Terry Jones

When landing in an airplane, the stewards go around and ask that people raise the pull-down covers on their windows. Why is that? How can it be so important that one can see out (in?) the windows during landing?

After landing, some airlines (in some cities) tell you to keep your mobile phone switched off until you’re inside the terminal building. On Easyjet they used to say something about it being dangerous because the plane was refueling. Uh, right.

Some of the newest planes have a camera mounted in the tail fin and the live video is shown in the cabin. It’s absolutely great, and passengers are spellbound. But, when you come in to land they turn it off! You can hear the groan go round the cabin. Why shut it off at the most interesting moment? Do passengers throw up or something? I always feel cheated.

Why, when standing waiting for bags to appear on the baggage belt, does everyone have to push to the front? It completely obscures the view for the 75% of people who are not at the front. We all learned in kindergarten to “take two steps backwards so everyone can see” etc. Makes so much sense in this context – you could all see, you could step calmly forward to take your bag when it showed, etc. But no. If you do leave a space, someone will just come and stand in it.

The Germans on my Air Berlin flights were just too calm. On landing, after taxiing to the gate and stopping, the vast majority of them didn’t bounce to their feet to start madly scrabbling for their bags. They just sat there. The aisle was only half full. Seated in a window seat, I nearly had a panic attack at the wasted opportunity to push ahead of a couple of people.

Last night I went out for dinner. I found a small restaurant. It was quite nice, looked like it might be mid-range price, had several tables of well mannered Germans dining quietly. Candles. Cloth napkins and tablecloths. Real knives and forks. All nicely done, nothing cheap about it.

I had a 400ml beer and a pizza margarita. The pizza was small but very good.

When I got the bill I was amazed, and did a cartoon-style double take. €5 in total. Very hard to beat.

I don’t understand why more people don’t go to conferences with a bag on wheels. I learned in 2000 that lugging a laptop in a shoulder bag around a busy conference for ten hours is extremely tiring. It was a Sony VAIO, weighing just over 1kg, so it wasn’t heavy itself. There’s also inevitable conference materials, t-shirt, cables, plug adaptors, maybe a sweater, external devices, reserve battery, notebook, spare business cards, stuff you don’t really want to leave in your hotel room (wallet, passport, keys), coins, phone(s), perhaps a novel, and all of a sudden you’ve got 6 kilos. Maybe more. I have a chronic back problem and I can’t deal with that much weight on one shoulder for a long time.

But with a wheeled bag you carry virtually zero weight. You don’t get tired. You have more capacity. You can carry a decent sized laptop. And if you want to buy a deeply discounted book (or 3) from the O’Reilly stand, you just do it.

I recently got a new wheeled bag. This is my first that allows you to rotate the handle. Instead of the handle being aligned perpendicular to your direction of travel, you can make it parallel. It’s surprising how much more comfortable this is. It follows the natural way your hand is aligned with your body, as though you were reaching out to shake someone’s hand. When you spend 10 hours a day at a conference, over 4 days, navigating airports, train stations and cavernous German convention halles, walking between hotel and conference or food, etc. etc., little things like that count.

I’m not good at working away from my home setup. I like my Kinesis keyboard, my big flat-screen monitor, and even the convenience of an external mouse. I don’t really like working without them.

But I’m learning to deal with being away. For the last few days I’ve been sitting in talks at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. There’s wifi and the speed is quite good. So I sit here checking out code, writing and running unit tests, and generally getting a few things done. I’m also surprised at how easy it is to work but also keep one ear on the presentation. The most obvious manifestation is when a speaker asks for a show of hands – I am surprised to find my hand going up (or not), without my really being very conscious of what’s going on. Before I hear the question, I’d have thought I wasn’t really listening. But it seems that I am.

That’s all good. One reason I don’t much like going to conferences is that they’re mainly down time. The talks are not good enough or fast enough or don’t have enough content, so if you sit in one it’s often frustrating. But in a way, lightweight talks are good, because they let you work in parallel. And if the talk does happen to be good you can always pay more attention.

I’m sitting in a hotel in Berlin, the Hotel Ibis Berlin Mitte. They’ve done a deal with Vodafone to provide wifi access for their guests.

Here’s the price list:

• 30 minutes – 5.95 euros, or $8.66
• 2 hours – 12.95 euros, or $18.85
• 24 hours – 29.95 euros, or $43.59

There’s no option to connect/disconnect and use your time bit by bit. You have to take it all at once, making the 24 hour option particularly attractive.

Way to go Vodafone! You idiots. With bargain basement rates like these I will certainly keep coming back. Same goes for you Ibis Hotel. Typical phone company strategy – maximally fuck your customers in the short term.

Did I forget to blog today?

No.

I wrote this at the airport in Barcelona waiting for a flight to Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

At check-in I wasn’t asked whether I had packed my bags myself of if I’d been with them constantly. It took about ten minutes total (including waiting in line) to get through security. The buzzer went when I went through the metal detector. The security guy didn’t send me back, he just frisked me quickly and thoroughly right there. No one asked me to take off my shoes or my belt. After checking in, no one asked me for my passport. Overall, extremely painless and with a minimum of nonsense.

I’ve left London a couple of times in the last month. Both times no one asked to see my passport until I was at the gate about to go down the tunnel to the plane. I was traveling without baggage and had printed my boarding cards at home. So the only person who looked at my passport was a regular Easyjet employee, who glanced at my face and the face in the passport and handed it back.

This is international travel in Western Europe today. It’s not always this easy, but it usually is.

Compare this to the pleasures of domestic US travel. Actually, I wont, but if you’ve done much US travel post-9/11 you’ll know what I’m referring to. Suffice to say I’m not looking forward to half a dozen US flights I have coming up.

Interestingly, between entering the plane and getting to my hotel in Berlin, I didn’t hear anyone speaking anything but German. Not a word of English or Spanish or anything else. There were probably 150 people on the plane, so it’s not as though I was alone.

Walking on the UCSD campus in 1998, I passed a bike rack that looked partly like a scrap metal junkyard. There were bikes in many conditions, from perfect to clearly abandoned rusting frames. Some had no wheels or no seat. Several were just a frame and a chain locked to the bike rack with a big expensive U-lock.

I thought “interesting, I wonder how they deal with these old bikes, possibly abandoned or forgotten bikes, abandoned frames, wheeless bikes, bikes whose owners died, etc. How can they know when it’s ok to cut something free and take it away? How can they know when it’s not ok?”

I saw the same problem at my apartment building, a similar tangle of 6 or 8 old bikes. Later, living in NYC down in the village I’d see hundreds of apparently abandoned eyesores. Blots on the fair face of the city.

So there’s the problem.

That is, devise a method or a policy for dealing with the removal of these bikes, ex-bikes, partial bikes, etc. Below are some requirements for a good solution. If you miss on any one of these, whatever you’re thinking of probably isn’t as good as what I thought of :-) There are many partial solutions.

1. It must be cheap. You must be able to employ regular people to carry out your plan. No high tech, no massive salaries, none of that.
2. It must be effective: no abandoned or unused bike will be missed.
3. There must be no waste.
4. Bike owners must get fair warning their bike is going to be taken away.
5. No-one should be able to cause anyone else’s bike to be taken away.
6. No-one should be able to cause a bike that should have been taken away not to be taken away.
7. No-one should be able to make a bike be taken away without the owner getting a fair chance to know it was due to be taken. E.g., with parking tickets I can simply take the parking ticket off any car I like and chuck it in the trash.
8. There should not be (as far as possible) opportunities to exploit the system by criminals.
9. You must not interfere with any bicycle (no marking them, etc).
10. The program must be something that has a high probability of being regarded as fair and which gets good press (everyone loves it, business comes to you).

Those are all the conditions I can think of right now, but there may be more.

You get to make all the decisions. Pretend you’re the mayor of NYC, coming up with a new policy for cleaning up the streets. And it’s an election year.

Yet another in the Homage to Barcelona series…

In September every year during the fiesta of La Mercè, there’s a Correfoc. It’s probably impossible to convey what being in the middle (or, more likely, on the side) of the Correfoc feels like. The name comes from the combination of the Catalan words for run and fire. The Correfoc proceeds along Via Laietana. It’s incredibly loud, smoky, chaotic, and some would say dangerous. I can’t imagine such a thing being allowed in more “civilized” countries, for fear of injury, lawsuits, etc. People are advised to come with some kind of head covering to avoid getting burnt by showers of sparks. The Correfoc is unforgettable.

The main Correfoc is so explosively crazy that they put on a scaled down version for kids. That happens a couple of hours earlier, when it’s still light. The explosions are fewer and perhaps softer, and there’s less in the way of flame and sparks. But it’s still damned impressive.

Here’s a video I took at the 2007 Correfoc. My son Lucas (age 6) was relatively brave this year. I managed to get him to stay crouching with me on the road sheltering under a top in the middle of dancing devils and showers of sparks. He was terrified and exhilarated at the same time.

Remember: this is just the kids’ version. Turn your volume up to Max and you might get an idea of the noise level. The background thumping is the sound of drums.

In contrast, last year (aged 5) we took him to the adult version, having missed the kids’ one. He was standing on a windowsill with three other kids, all yelling in advance for them to “bring on the fire!” etc. When the Correfoc got within range he lasted about 30 seconds. As you can see, the adult version is pretty severe. Take a look.

I don’t mean to appear cold-hearted. I have a heart. Really. But news of a shakeup at Powerset given release delays doesn’t come as a surprise at all.

What is surprising is to read that Powerset has “been hampered by limited resources.” Oh puhleease. Since when has $12.5M (minimum) in funding qualified as having limited resources?

Delays in getting hold of the Xerox NLP API caused fundamental problems? I used that API (ten years ago, admittedly) and, sorry to say, it’s not the key to unlocking the natural language understanding puzzle. But it was widely trumpeted as the key to Powerset knocking off Google. The mysterious all-powerful NLP API from the mysterious all-fumbling Xerox PARC finally lands in the hands of a commercial company poised to Make Good! Powerset had snatched the NLP crown jewels out from under Google’s nose!

It wouldn’t surprise me if PARC were glad to get rid of the rusty old thing. “Psssst, buddy. You over there… wanna buy an antique NLP API owned by former royalty? S’good fer what ails ya.”

OK, I’m being a bit sarcastic and silly. I guess I just have limited patience for these projects and especially for the breathless hype that surrounds them.

I’ve often wondered about Powerset (and Metaweb) hitting the wall. Lots of hype, pressure, and funding. Lots of people. High burn rate. And revenue coming from…… where exactly? And that’s not to mention the blow to our confidence that Powerset were really onto something deep when they let a genius programmer drink and get away from his handlers at a dotcom-style bash.

I’d say the real reason Powerset are “hampered” is the fact that they’re trying to solve something that’s practically impossible.

If you look at it that way, then I suppose having only $12.5M to achieve the impossible really is a case of having limited resources.

Stay tuned. There’s a long, nasty and heartless blog posting locked up inside me about people and companies that chase words like “understanding”, “meaning” and “intelligence”.

First of all, let me just say that Jason Calacanis is a genius.

Having said that, I most humbly submit that his posting today on Facebook’s WORST two features is a little off in one regard.

I also hate the way Facebook tries to pull me into its world when they could so easily just deliver my message in email. But I don’t think they’re doing it for the page views.

I think they’re doing it because they want to take over the world.

Once there were PCs. Then came the mass migration towards online apps that run in one’s browser. Microsoft got that one right, though they were a little early in calling it (culling it?), and then ironically were present at the conception and birth of what really kicked it into high gear, XMLHttpRequest. But that’s another story.

So what’s next? Or, what would Facebook like to be next? Well, the obvious next step in the progression: mass migration to a particular platform running inside your browser. It just makes sense.

Except it doesn’t.

But that’s what I think Facebook will be going after. They want us all in there. That’s where we should be sending and receiving messages, IMs, poking each other, and, of course, throwing expensive virtual food. Why not twitter in Facebook? Why not Tabblo in Facebook? Why not watch videos inside of Facebook? Why not everything in Facebook?

There’s no way it can work, but I bet that’s what they’re going after – to as great an extent as possible. A bundle of cash will make for some nice acquisitions, as would an IPO. And everything they buy is going to wind up inside Facebook.

I’ll save my reasons for why it can’t work for another posting.

I love Barcelona. I love living in Barcelona. There are many reasons. One of them is that stuff like the following happens on a regular basis.

At 8pm tonight I could hear music outside that was louder than the music on my stereo. So I turned off my music and went out on my balcony (did I mention the wonderful Barcelona climate yet?). Down in the street an impromptu concert had struck up. I’ve seen many of them, and I love them. They’re loud and raw and energetic, and the sound and feeling in the narrow streets is just fantastic.

I went back to work, leaving the balcony door open. Neighbors were out listening and looking. After ten minutes I decided to go down and film a little for you, gentle reader (etc). So here you go, Bésame mucho, as played by a French 20-piece brass band in the street about 50 meters from my front door. I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to live here, why you would want to live in a place where this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I’ve been here nearly 12 years, and I don’t think I take this stuff for granted at all. I love it.

Apologies for the shaking video, there were probably a couple of hundred people there and I had one arm up in the air to do the filming.

Fastest news in the West? Twitter wins hands down.