Author Archives: Mike O'Connor

Son Richard was in the paper over the weekend

Here's the link to the article, which ran in the St Paul paper this Sunday – click here for the story.

A great lesson in community organizing and Margaret Mead's famous quote Quote:

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Marcie and I were a part of that committed group of parents that changed the direction of the school. But it was Richard who stole the show. At both of the big public meetings, he got up and made the comment that people all remembered.

Pretty cool guy, that Rich.

Havenco – the rise and fall of a data haven

I have an admission to make. I was inspired to get the haven.com domain (which I use for all my personal stuff on the 'net) after reading some cyber-punk novel or other. Might have been Neuromancer by Bill Gibson or maybe Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Whatever. Anyway I was entranced with the idea of “data havens” that was floating around in the fiction of that time, and that's what was on my mind when it came time to get my very first ever domain name. I was tickled to death to find out that haven.com was available (for free back in those days).

Some years later, Ryan Lackley contacted me to see if I would be interested in selling him the domain for a new venture he was involved with, which at that time was called HavenCo. Their premise was to set up a secure data haven in this odd little place called Sealand (that’s their official “national” site — also check out the Wikipedia entry about Sealand, which includes the latest developments like the fire in 2006). Sealand is an old WWII gun platform about 10 miles off the coast of England that is owned by a pretty odd character who dubbed himself “Prince Roy”, declared himself a sovereign nation and embarked on all kinds of schemes ranging from ship registry to fishing tours.

I passed — we'd just sold gofast.net, and I'd sold Television.com and Company.com and was feeling like I needed a breather.

HavenCo launched about a year later (July 2000), amidst much fanfare and a fabulous piece in Wired Magazine.

Well, almost five years have passed as I write this and as I was updating my web site with a little group of links called “All the Havens this isn't…” I decided to see how HavenCo was doing. Unfortunately, as with lots of schemes that were hatched in 1999, HavenCo isn't doing so well these days.

Here's a link to the official HavenCo web site. Doesn't look too bad does it? The site's still up, and it appears that they're still open for business. Well, not so fast.

Here's an article that ran in 2002 that starts giving you a clue that maybe things are starting to unravel. Check out the pictures of the Sealand platform. Hmm. I'm not sure I'd want to put much of a raised-floor computer/network operations center out there. And I sure wouldn't want to live out there for a couple years the way Ryan eventually did.

Here's Ryan's writeup of where things are at — which is the usual disarray of failed contracts combined with a dash of international sovereignty foolishness. I found this paper that Ryan presented at DefCon to be especially poignant.

So to sum up — it looks like (as of this writing) HavenCo is limping along, milking it's remaining customers for whatever it can. The founders are all gone. Lawsuits abound. Dreams are shattered. Geeks are pissed.

Sigh. So many stories like this… Remember all that baloney in Wired Magazine about The Long Boom that started coming out in 1997 or so? Oh well…

Podcasting

Julio’s been writing about podcasting for (seemingly) ever — and i didn’t read any of the posts until today when he pointed folks at this great 4 Minutes About Podcasting movie.

NOW I get it!

Amazing — all of the “tell your own story” ethic of community radio, combined with all the cool “build your own feed” capability of RSS feeds, which results in “radio” that’s going to show up in Google.. If you’re a community-radio type person who hasn’t messed around with podcasting, go watch that movie — and then let your imagination run wild. I’m sitting here thunderstruck, realizing what the possibilities are…

What an amazing community technology. For example; you’re an organizer of (fill in the blank), laboring away in your local community. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to hear an occasional “show” about your cause, direct from the mouth of your inspirational mentor? If you’re an inspirational-mentor type person, wouldn’t it be great to periodically share your “show” with others?

Or, if you’re more like the typical community-radio programmer, wouldn’t it be great to reach the .0003% of the population of the planet who shares your passion about (fill in the blank)? Conversely, wouldn’t it be great to listen to shows produced by people who exactly share your tastes and views?

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be broadcasters. Their days of being in any way relevant are numbered.

This one totally nifty technology. Thanks Julio for pointing me at the link that finally turned the light bulb on. I’m going to add useful links “below the fold” as I explore — to see that stuff, hit the “read more” button.

Bandwidth — A puzzler

The community radio movement was all about access to limited bandwidth (in our case, noncommercial FM channels). Podcasting is going to present an interesting bandwidth problem for the person with a really popular podcast — it’s going to slurp up a lot of bandwidth to deliver a 50 mByte file to thousands (millions?) of fans that are hungry for your stuff. Looks to me like we’ll need to marry BitTorrent with podcasting pretty soon now.

I’m really interested in the “how do you do it?” part of podcasting right now, so that’s what this first collection of links reflects.

Engadget provided a great starting point on this page about podcasting.

Creating podcasts is pretty straightforward — make a radio show, but pipe it off to an MP3 file when you’re done. I was Googling for “make a podcast” and got zillions of articles about how to make digital radio shows — lots of talk about mixers, and line-inputs-to-the-computer, and like that.

What I’m interested in right now is the RSS feed part — and the very last part of that Engaget article is what tipped me over to understanding. It all revolves around the notion of an “enclosure” in an RSS feed — something that most blog-creating software doesn’t grok yet, but I bet all off them will soon.

I think for now I’ll try just editing up my own RSS feed by hand rather than trying to force-feed Xoops (the software I’m using to create this blog). I’m going to use the XML file in the Engadget article as a template, build me a little “hello world” podcast and see how I do. But not right away. First I gotta finish helping Marcie lay down flooring in the upstairs room at the farm.

Great eye and ear candy – Arcade Machine Self Test

Way to go Gizmondo — an amazing post here to delight your senses. As long as you're willing to spend a little time outside the box, that is.

Head on through to the assembler.org site and try the two screens out — I like the animated one the best. Even better with the suggested MP3 tracks playing at the same time. Took me back to my “new music” days in the late '60's these did. Very excellent.

Rural development

Marcie and I alternate between a house in town (4 days a week) and our farm three days a week.

One of the things that bugs me about the farm is how difficult it is for people to make a living in rural America. It seems to me that just like there's a pretty strong tide running in the “outsourcing” trend, there's also a trend that ultimately leaves rural America empty — except for “gentleman farmers” like me.

Lots of people have observed this before me, but now I'm a part of a rural community, so I devote a little more of my time working on the problem. Here's a story that just ran about Center for Rural Entrepreneurship and some strategies that small rural towns are adopting in order to retain their younger generation.

I hate to be a grouch, but I don't think this kind of thing is going to work. The underlying economic forces are so strong that efforts like these strike me as wishful thinking.

I hope to be wrong on this one, but as I've poked around in my Western Wisconsin county, I have discovered that there's no business-starting infrastructure left. The local banks have all been sold to regionals, as have the bedrock main-street businesses (the phone company, electric company, grain elevator, etc.). Big-boxes are killing the local retailers.

More than just brains are fleeing — capital is too. Used to be that farmer-capital would get reinvested in local projects (a meat packing plant or a window manufacturing company). Now, when farmers sell their land (which they didn't used to do), the money winds up in a Fidelity account and invested in the usual-suspect portfolio.

As a tech guy, I've been involved in the rural development discussion for years, mostly focusing on the need for broadband Internet. Internet is often painted as the economic savior for rural America. Sorry kids, but this isn't going to cut it — any job you can do over the wire in Western Wisconsin can be outsourced to a place with much lower wages. Don't bet the ranch on that idea. Sure, you have to have Internet as a precondition for lots of other things, but it isn't going to float the boat.

Sorry to be such a grouch — but that article started this little cascade and I had to get it off my chest.

Winter project — a dresser for Marcie

I’m kicking off a new topic area — Woodworking. The “notes to myself” I wrote about my home brew PVR (“FreeVo”) project is what inspired me. Another kind of geek stuff I do is fooling around trying to teach myself how to make furniture. So this is the first of an periodic series of posts describing my efforts.

This winter, the “big project” was to try out making a dresser. This is my first foray into the realm of boxes — and this dresser has 7 of ’em! The big box of the dresser case, plus six little boxes for the drawers. The big lesson learned is that making things square in two dimensions is a lot easier than making them square in three. The big box is out of square about an eighth of an inch and that wound up driving me nuts for the whole project thereafter — constant corrections.

I built this dresser following (slightly modified) plans from Bill Hylton’s Chests of Drawers book. A great book — filled with plans that are mostly way too advanced for me, but very clear and good at helping navigate the rough patches.

Dresser1

Here’s a picture of the big box, just after I glued it up. It was at this point that my fateful eighth of an inch out-of-square crept into the scene. I got too cute — I used mortise and tenon joints instead of the loose tenon joints that Bill describes in the book and paid the price for deviating from the instructions of the Maestro.

 

Dresser2

Now the “big box” is basically done. The top isn’t structural, it’s going to get hooked on with those little angle irons you use to put solid-wood tops on tables.

 

Dresser3

These are the blanks for the drawer handles. Another “first” on this project was to learn how to do pattern cutting with the router. Now that’s a gizmo! I can tell I’ll be having a lot of fun with that router bit in days to come.

 

Dresser4

Now the six “little boxes” are done and mounted. This dresser uses drawer-mounting hardware like you’d find in kitchen cabinets. I’m still a little too ham-handed to make a real dresser where the drawers fit in the dresser frame directly. Maybe some day, but only after I get better at square. One neat thing about this hardware is that it’s got a little gizmo that “self closes” the drawer in the last 3 inches of its travel — sorta like the trunks on fancy cars.

 

Dresser5

All done. I like it a lot, and Marcie does too. I’ve adjusted that one drawer-front that’s a little out of whack in this picture so everything’s looking pretty good unless you know exactly where to look for that dreaded eighth of an inch.

Blink – a cool "thin slicing" concept for intuitive managers like me

Malcome Gladwell (the guy that wrote The Tipping Point) has a new book out called “Blink.” The NYTimes just ran the first chapter of the book in their cunningly-named First Chapter section. Fersure hit this link to Blink on Gladwell's site where he outlines the broader themes of the book.

I like it. I've spent my whole career being accused of jumping to conclusions (so I've gotten better, although not great, at keeping my mouth shut until a little supporting data rolls in). I think a lot of us have run into the same problem. You know what the situation is, but if you blurt it out, you're likely to get beat up by people who need lots of supporting facts.

Maybe you've just got a really rich set of experiences that your subconscious is taking advantage of. Perhaps you're just good at “blink.” I like this book's premise because it reminds me to value those 2-second blinks, and gives me a way to rationalize those leaps of cognition to other people.

FreeVo — My home-brew Tivo, minus the monthly subscription fees

This is the latest geek project — reclaiming Robert’s old PC and transmogrifying it into a personal video recorder (PVR for short) with a Hauppauge PVR 350 and SageTV software.

Sure, I could have gone out and bought a Tivo or ReplayTV for about the same (or maybe a little less) money. But I see several advantages to doing it myself;

  • I get a glorious few weeks of primo geek tinkering/learning (in addition to the PVR stuff I found myself introduced to the “silent PC” geek sub-cult as I realized that the PC was making way too much noise to remain in the living room without modification)
  • I get a PVR that I can reconfigure (add disk, add more video cards, etc.) when I want to
  • I don’t have to pay a monthly fee to TiVo (I’m using SageTV software that sucks down the program guides off the web for free)
  • I can share/view the shows all over the home network
  • I can participate in EFF’s call to arms over the “broadcast flag” and be my own hardware vendor at the same time.

    This blog entry is my “notes to myself” to record the saga, and will serve as a reminder if I have to come back and retrace my steps at some point in the future. If you decide to do this, it might be a useful set of tips for you too. For the details… read on
    Continue reading →

    • google toolbar for Firefox

    Yep, like everybody I've switched to Firefox. I'm just a slave to fashion.

    But I'm addicted to the Google Toolbar which only works under Internet Explorer.

    Fortunately, there's an open source project that duplicates the toolbar for Firefox called Googlebar.. Just installed it a few days ago. It works great and has some features that Google's doesn't. One that I found intriguing was the ability to restrict a search to a given institution of higher education.

    Very nifty gizmo…

    "how to be creative" and other manifestos from ChangeThis.com

    I hang with a short-attention-span crowd — so we're always changing our job/direction/passion.

    I like this “How To Be Creative” manifesto a lot. It encapsulates many of the ideas that I share with folks when they are in that creative, unfrozen, floating period between gigs. This is kinda like Powdermilk Biscuits — gets you up and doing the things you need to do.

    I also like the whole Change This site — comprised mostly of “manifestos” by irascible opinionated curmudgeons like me.

    I came across a web-development manifesto – “One Minute Site” – which spoke loudly enough to get me up off my rusty dusty and plug some changes into my sister's web site. One Minute Site is a great rant against the overly-complex, overly graphical/technical sites that “web developers” foist off on their clients. I've been making the same rant for ages, as have many of my good web-dev friends, but One Minute Site does a great job of presenting the argument.

    I'm happily pecking my way through the rest of the site — I bet a few more manifestos make their way into this blog.

    Anonymous Blogs – another tool for community-building

    The Annual O’Connor Christmas Day Christmas Party always produces a few really interesting conversations. This year I talked to an old friend (who will remain anonymous – you’ll see why in a minute) about using blogs as a way for people to talk to each other without revealing their identity.

    This kind of thing has been happening on the Internet ever since the beginning, but public blog site (like Blog Spot) make it MUCH easier for “normal people” to set up an anonymous space than most of the preceding tools.

    So natcherly, this morning the New York Times runs a story about an anonymous blog. Pretty darn handy. The story on the Times site is about Anonymous Lawyer, a fictional web site about life in a Big Law law-firm. A great example of an anonymous site, run on a public blog service.

    In this case, eventually you find out the identity of the author of the site, but only because he allows that to happen. I imagine there are lots of blogs out there where it would be very hard to figure out the real identity of the person posting.

    Another possibility would be to set up a “private group” on Yahoo Groups. That would tend to keep your posts off the search engines — a drawback to Blog Spot is that most of their blogs get sucked into the search engines (I’m not sure whether you can make a Blog Spot blog “private”).

    If you have a finite group of people in the group, you could all share the same user-name and password when posting to your blog/group and thus add another layer of anonymity to the conversations.

    Marcie’s blog is an example of a site where identity is consciously “managed” within narrow limits. She’s very careful not to reveal the location of our farm, because she doesn’t want people to come visiting unannounced. For a long time, you also wouldn’t have been able to get in touch with Marcie except through the blog, although we recently changed that.

    So — if you’re an organizer looking for a place where identity can be masked in order to have candid discussions, consider a blog on a public server.

    Digital audio enhancement

    I've always liked to hang out with people who are REALLY into what they do, often to the point of being irascible and grouchy because there's nobody for them to talk to as a peer.

    One such fellow is Steve Emly, the founder/proprietor of Emcom. Steve is into network monitoring at a level that defies description and I love learning from him.

    Son Richard and I are embarking on the (probably ludicrous) project of converting my vinyl record collection to digital and I came across another fellow who's at the “guru level” during the process of looking for “de-click, de-pop” software to clean up my beat up old vinyl.

    I don't know what his name is, but I **know** that he's another person who's functioning at that supremo-geek level — I would love to meet him some day. BTW, I know it's a “him” because he's got to be the curmudgeon narrating the video on his web site. Bet the house.

    If you ever want to learn about digital audio recording or digital sound enhancement, head out to Enhanced Audio or the associated TracerTek (which seems to be down today, but is the bigger/better site). Download copies of his free demo software and the tutorial that goes with it. Spend an enjoyable half day narking around with his DC Six software and you will be a whole lot smarter than when you started.

    He's into cleaning up old records, but he's also really into forensic audio. You know, where the cops have bugged your office, you've used loud music to cover up your conversation about the big drug deal? He's got some killer software that will remove the music and leave the conversation behind. Very much reminded me of the old movie Blowup. Some of the demos are to die for. Definitely a great geek holiday that you can take from the comfort of your workstation.

    Rip Mix Burn Sue — a fantastic lecture by Edward Felton

    Ah. Every once in a while I come across a fantastic lecturer who illuminates a huge topic. Carl Sagan did that for me when i was at Cornell — I used to play hooky from classes and go sit in on his Astronomy 101 lectures (as did several hundred other folks).

    A less known example is Hubert Alyea who was a brilliant Princeton chemistry educator upon whom The Absent Minded Professor was modeled. He was a colleague of my Dad and I grew up listening to Professor Alyea's amazing chemistry lectures (from which the notion of Flubber emerged).

    Professor Felton (also at Princeton) is in this league in this lecture “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue”. The stream's likely to be one of the best hours you can spend if you're interested in the digital media rights issue.

    Here are a few topics;

    – How Sandra Day O'Connor saved the fast forward button

    – A great explanation of how to digitize media

    – Technology convergence

    – The most important concept in Computer Science

    – The Celestial Jukebox and the Napster case

    – The Remix culture – Negativeland, the Grey album, Woody Guthrie

    – DVDJohn

    – The Fritz (Hollings) Chip

    And more. The whole stream is about an hour and a half, but I gave up at the Q&A session — the questions were long and badly recorded so I got tired of waiting. Same goes for the introductions — I skipped those as well. The lecture itself is an hour. Well worth every minute.