|
August 21. Moorkinson's Law. Storage capacity disappears
exponentially. Preparing to create a new front door here (jaycross.com),
my ISP deleted Jayhoo! (No problem there; I was forewarned.) But getting
ready to upload from my hard drive to the new location, I find that my
files consume 60 MB; my allowance is 50 MB. I'm flipping some stuff to my
other net accounts but it's frustrating not to be able to continue, free
as a bird, adding whatever comes into my head.
September 25. I'm spending about 60% time in Silicon Valley
these days, working in a building that once housed Next. Here are some of
the billboards along my 45-mile commute down the Bayshore. (I am not
making this up.)
| c|net. Technology expert available 24/7. The source for
computers & technology. cnet.com |
Lycos. (picture of dog). The fastest retriever in cyberspace.
Lycos.com. Go get it. |
| No salary earning, no socks wearing, billionaire on paper,
Internet CEO. Forbes |
The Internet could actually be good for your health. Planet
rx.com. Health at your fingertips. |
| We've got to start meeting like this. Webex.com |
Linuxcare. Linuxcare.com |
| Experience extreme knowing. First in enterprise
decision-support. Business Objects. |
Who's watching your network?
Network Associates
(picture of woman in mini-skirt.) |
|
Who's watching your network?
Network Associates
(picture of geek swordswallower) |
Jaguar
Putnam Jaguar
www.putnamjaguar.com |
| Log on. Go nuts. Sony Direct.com. A whole new way to buy Sony.
|
Give the people what they want. e-centives.com |
|
Building the Internet infrastructure
Inktomi |
Play with customer email? e-gain.com. Customer service solutoins
for e-commerce. |
e  SAP |
Who's the leader in network security? www.checkpoint.com |
| All marketing is not equal. www.market-first.com |
You don't have a trust fund and no one rich wants to marry you.
e-trade |
| Lots of software. No pants required. Beyond.com |
Garden.com
Plants. Advice. Delivery |
| The information highway starts in Taiwan. |
Wow! tool. aveo.com |
| Buysoft.com. The Internet Software Superstore. |
Socialnet.com. Meet people you click with. |
| Who you going to listen to? audible.com |
Need a playmate? socialnet.com |
| fax me here. fax me there. fax me anywhere. get faxes by email.
free. e-fax.com |
Yahoo! A nice place to stay on the Internet. Newly remodeled chat
rooms.
(sign decked out like an ad for a Reno hotel.) |
|
imac unplugged.
Think Different. |
road scholar
Think Different. |
|
imac to go.
Think Different. |
|
Another "Big Issue" of Forbes ASAP just arrived. Topic
is Convergence. Insights are phenomenal.
|
"A great deal of today's excitement over convergence is stil what
might be called 'small think.' As important as the convergence of
computers, telephones, and television might be, or the convergence
of, say, retailing and entertainment, or of agriculture and lasers,
higher levels of convergence are potentially even more powerful. To
reduce the concept to what's happening with computers and the media
is to miss what could be the most profound consequences...."
"...technologies may converge with one another, but they also
converge with elements of society and culture in ways that produce
not simply profit for this or that company, or the restructuring of
industries and economies, but, over time, the restructuring and
convergence of whole civilizations."
Alvin and Heidi Toffler |
|
"So, to sum up: Here we are, approaching the Great Convergence,
thanks to the many others that went before. But this time, all of
what I have described is about to happen again in spades,
exacerbated by the fact that in the porcess of convergence and
innovation, the only certainty is uncertainty and the only constant
is change. Every convergence so far has therefore caught people
napping because by definition you can't prepare for novelty.
Particularly because in most cases innovation doesn't just provide a
faster, cheaper, easier way to do what you were doing before. It
also generates new things, ideas, and ways of living that weren't
there previously."
James Burke |
|
"Among the bridging disciplines born of biology is cognitive
neuroscience, also popularly know as the brain sciences. Its
techniques include PET and MRI, which are used to map mental
activity difectly, and nearly in real time. The internal
classification of visual images, and other advanced thought
processes, are tracked as metabolic activity in the brain. The
procedures are improving in space-time resolution and being linked
to other modes of analysis in biology and psychology. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that the physical basis of thought can be
pinned to nerve-cell circuitry, surges of neurotransmitters, and
mediation by hormones. The conscious mind itself can be decoded as
scenarios representing sensory perceptions of the present world, as
well as scenarios remembered and imagined. The self then becomes the
principal actor on the internal stage -- part of the physicochemcial
process, not an ethereal spirit witnessing the play. The
neurobiologists have only begun such formulations, but they appear
well positioned to solve the mind-body probblem, the great conundrum
that has broken the pen of thinker upon thinker through the
ages."
Edward O. Wilson |
|
"This great synthesis we are supposed to be witnessing, in which
time collapses, distances conflate, work becomes play, science
blends with religion, and the lion and the lamb lie down together
and email sweet nothings in the chat room of history -- this great
convergence breeds enthusiasts....I am not enthusiastic about this."
Andrew Ferguson |
|
"There are patterns to history, but they are seldom as simple as
a straight line, or even a sine wave. The shape of historical
repetition is closer to a helix -- things come around again but on a
different plane."
Michael Milken |
|
"But topping even that, in 1997, in what is surely this decade's
most explosive discovery, photons were shown to be cognizant of
other photons in the universe, a situation described as "entangled
states." Such cosmic kumbaya hints at a communications medium in the
universe that is instnat. Instant would be to the speed of
light as light is to a dying snail in your driveway. Instant
suggests that God really could stay in touch with all his
creatures."
Rich Karlgaard |
If many magazines were this rich with ideas, I'd be tempted to give up
books. And did I mention that the articles are punctuated with stunning
charts on subjects like the convergence of technologies? All that and
Forbes ASAP is available on the web. For free.
Last week's Sunday New York TImes was another mindblower. A 100o
years of art.
October 14, 1999. Busy days. I'm into idea mapping,
finding it quite useful for thinking things through.
November 24, 1999. I'm feeling on top of the world. New computer
at home with 19" monitor, 20 gig hard drive, DSL connection, working
scanner and printer. Sony VAIO laptop, lightweight, nifty looking, very
functional. Several challenging projects. Life is good.
 There's something in
the air that smells like the sixties. In 1969, even though I was an Army
officer in Germany, revolution felt at hand. Protests, fantastic songs,
flower children roaming the globe, defying authority, ripe for change,
stop the war, do your own thing, crazy people in the streets, Number 9 -
Number 9 - Number 9, Woodstock, Easy Rider, four dead in Ohio, the
underground. It felt like any day now people would storm the barricades,
put down the pigs, take things into their own hands, stop the war, empower
the people, make love in the streets, free the slaves, and return to
simple values.
Today the waves of a tsunami lap our shores. Unimaginable breakthroughs
in electronics and communications. New ways of thinking. Personal media
unleashed. Free agents. Everything connected to everything else. Waiting
being replaced by real time. It's not just greener over the hill -- the
valleys are paved with diamonds. I'm beginning to think that e-Business is
a metaphor for the information society. Things are happening fast. So fast
they undergo a phase change. Ice melts into water, society melts into
chaos.
January 21, 2000. This millennium I've read Million Dollar
Consulting by Alan Weiss, Zen Computer by Philip Toshio Sudo,
How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb, The Innovator's
Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, Life 102, What to do
when your guru sues you by Peter McWilliams, and Seurat by John
Russell. Now I'm into Carl Hiassen's Sick Puppy, The Story of
Time, and Net Ready. The bookshelf is groaning under the weight
of many, many others to read: Howard Gardiner's latest, Geoffrey Moore's
latest, Ray Kurtzweil's latest, Timothy Galwey's latest, yadda, yadda,
yadda.
In a quest to capture things flying by, I've started recording
interesting shit in a log and useful
information on e-Learning and performance topics in a research
notes file. This is at best an interim solution -- it's too cumbersome. I
don't mind writing in HTML -- in fact, it's often superior to Word -- but
the files are in different spots and not easily accessed from multiple
locations.
February 5, 2000. This week Wayne
Hodgins and I finished writing our vision paper for the Commission
on Technology and Adult Learning. This one's a little far out there --
five to ten years from now, written for a group of policymakers that
includes both savvy and unclued participants. Caution: It's a 960
KB Acrobat file.
| Stream of Consciousness Log
|
jay @
25-Apr-00 |
| |
I'm testing a simpler way to add from the streaming
thoughts....
|
|
And the experiment was a success! Stream of Consciousness continues as
blog.
|
is an
experiment, a plaything, a place for Jay to toss ideas up in the air to
see if they float. My Web pages, Internet Time
Group and my personal
page, haven't been as experimental as I'd like them to be. 
Learned a
six-hour lesson from Dreamweaver. I inadvertantly switched from
document-specific references to site-specific links. Everything was
hunky-dory until I moved the site to a different directory. Without a
clear explanation, some of my pointers linked to impossible destinations.
404, 404, 404. I manually tweaked things -- and if my magic, other changes
would creep in. Automatic software is dynamite but one little action can
flip it out, piling errors on top of errors. Dang.
I'm enjoying
the book although (1) I think a book on design warrants lots of pictures
and (2) the text is easily twice as long as it needs to be to deliver the
message.
I gotta
lose weight. 