Early Days of Usenet

Ever since the early days of the Internet which, by the way, predates the invention of the browser by at least a decade, there has been a form of social networking. In the mid to late 1980s and on into the 1990s, that was Usenet. Usenet was a collection of so-called "newsgroups" which weren't so much news as discussion boards.

Now, many sites have discussion boards. They are now ubiquitous throughout the Web. However, Usenet brought them under one umbrella. You would get a newsreader, which was a client-side software tool (text-based, much like working with vi or emacs) and then you'd pick a few newsgroups you were into. Many of them used naming schemes that classified it. Thus "rec" would refer to recreation and might include sports as well as TV shows.

For example, when I first became aware of newsgroups, sometime in the late 1980s, Star Trek: The Next Generation had just started. Needless to say, due to the number of nerds on at Usenet, a far higher percentage then than now, there were plenty of ST:TNG fans (ST:TNG is an acronym for the show). You'd have at least half a dozen reviewers. Names like Vidiot, Michael Rawdon, Atsushi Kanamori, and, of course, Tim Lynch were the authority figures, folks that wrote about each episode, dissected what they liked and didn't like.

And much as geekdom was not simply isolated to computers and Star Trek, there was also a huge fascination with sex. Usenet groups, legitimate ones anyway, went through this approval process. I believe some guy at Purdue approved each group and there were hundreds of such groups. However, there were also groups that some wanted without approval, and they all fell in the "alt" groups, the most famous of which was, alt.sex.

For a long while, alt.sex was a pretty fascinating newsgroup. People would freely ask questions, discuss their own personal experiences. Alternate lifestyles were fascinating. I recall a guy who was married in an open relationship. Both he and his wife would sleep with other men and women, in 2-somes and 3-somes. Their view outside the normal spectrum showed a world few were familiar with.

Due to the relative anonymity of the Internet, several phenomenon that exist to this day showed up. Most common were "flame wars". A flame was an incendiary post meant to take a highly opinionated position and often to criticize someone severely. These arguments were more emotional than persuasive and people easily became incensed by contrary viewpoints.

Why did this happen? Ask yourself who read these newsgroups? Typically, bored geeky guys that were passionate about a particular subject, say, Star Trek. Once you get hundreds of such people, it's not hard to have at least one person have a view that is contrary to the views of many. Atsushi Kanamori, for example, enjoyed Star Trek a great deal, but he found most episodes of TNG to be tripe. He argued why he thought it was that way, but it seemed 2 of every 3 reviews were negative. Fans of the show argued with him about the awesome-ness of the show, but since he reasoned his argument out in a review, he was often better prepared to retort.

And that was a civil discussion.

I used to be involved in a tennis newsgroup. During the height of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, Seles got stabbed and took nearly 2 years off from the tour. Ardent Seles fans, who were all male, demanded Steffi return all the trophies that she won saying they were tainted because Seles was not there to challenge her for them. To be fair, Seles probably would have won her share of trophies during that period, but in a way, it's no different than if Seles had been injured and returned slowly to the tour.

The point is, even a newsgroup as potentially boring as tennis, was still filled with passionate people with passionate arguments.

What was interesting about this tennis newsgroup, and honestly, a whole host of other newsgroups, some devoted to fairly erudite topics such as artificial intelligence or arcane subjects in math, was its ability to attract passionate people who loved a particular subject matter together with other people of similar interests.

I used to love following tennis, but it was really hard prior to the Internet. If you watched tennis in the day, you could only get coverage for matches between the French Open and the US Open. This typically included some of the US tournaments (then played on clay). It was rare to see even the early hardcourt season played in Miami and Indian Wells even though those matches had been played for years. The Philadelphia Indoors was a major indoor tournament that was rarely covered on TV. Forget the entire European clay court circuit which was barely reported on.

In those days, it was amazing just to get tennis results. Most local papers didn't bother with tennis scores. At the time, the best place to get tennis scores was USA Today. USA Today may have been called "McNewspaper" for its generally cheery and somewhat controversy-free news reporting, but it also had a sports section that covered sports nationwide and internationally.

Believe me, even tennis scores don't begin to adequately cover what happens in tennis, but in those days, if you were into tennis, then tennis scores were better than nothing. You could, in principle, try to track an individual player week to week and see how they did. All you would have is scores since live coverage was out of the question.

The newsgroup, in those days, was primarily devoted to the pro game. Sure, there was the occasional discussion of how to play tennis, but Usenet's medium was primarily text. In the early 1990s, there was no YouTube. The best you could hope for was to post photos, and even back then, digital cameras were rare, and there was no convenient way to produce slow motion video from which to take digital stills.

Tennis instruction wouldn't take off again til about 2007. By then, YouTube had existed a few years, and people were producing high quality tennis audio and video and able to acquire slow motion video of the pros and begin to dissect their shots. Up until then, information about how to play tennis seemed like a deeply held secret among certain tennis coaches and that information was not widely disseminated, not even in the "Dummies" books that were starting to abound.

Anonymity creates a strange social dynamic. On the one hand, people will say critical things in front of others and not fear any repercussion. I used to participate in a college newsgroup about issues affecting colleges. One person was adamant in his hatred of affirmative action claiming it was reverse discrimination. The African Americans (at the time) tended to ignore what he said so there was rarely intelligent discussion. Liberals just assumed affirmative action was right and conservatives assumed it was wrong, and there wasn't much discussion, just heated arguments.

Thus, behind the veil of anonymity, people behave in ways that are outside the norm. On the flip side, anonymity sometimes lead to people being a lot more honest. For example, suppose a person was having an affair, or they were gay, or a whole host of things that would be seen unfavorably if their friends new (they were sexaholics, etc). They could get to a newsgroup and discuss it in relative anonymity being a lot more open knowing they could leave at any time.

Of course, the flip side also held true. If people couldn't see you, then perhaps you could pretend to be someone you're not. If you were 50, you might pretend to be 20, and so forth. All sorts of social behavior that has evolved over time to let us interact mostly peacefully begin to deteriorate when bad behavior doesn't have to be reined in. That beautiful girl? Ask her to remove her clothes? That "ugly" person? Criticize them for being a lardo.

It's perhaps no surprise that many of the behaviors that spontaneously evolved during that time continue to this day. People still flame. People still pretend to be other people. People still are passionate about topics and find others that are similarly passionate. Sociologists may one day look at this period, near to the cusp of a new millennium, and wonder how the nature of the Internet and anonymity lead to the burgeoning of the earliest form of social networking, and how people began to view notions such as honesty and privacy in surprisingly different ways.

Nicknames?

Nicknames were given to people to make their names easier to pronounce and to create a familiarity with them. Thus, David is Dave, Robert is Bob or Rob, and so forth. All of a sudden, people seem to prefer the lengthy names.

I know a guy named Anthony who prefers to go by Anthony, not Tony. A guy who prefers David over Dave. A guy who prefers Michael over Mike. Indeed, as Michael Phelps's mother was cheering him on, it wasn't with exhortations of Mike, but Michael.

Why the trend? I couldn't say, but it's something I've noticed.

Intelligent Lights

You know, the biggest innovation in traffic lights are the sensors in the ground that detect if a car is around. Surprisingly, there's not been anything new that I can see.

This is what I want. It would be nice to have a camera aimed at the traffic, and estimate how much traffic has arrived, and to adjust the lights based on approaching traffic and crowdedness rather than a simple algorithm based on time. Admittedly, there might be some kind of equilibrium that you reach by using timed lights.

But whatever. It seems like we should be able to get more intelligent light changing that makes people wait less on average.

Reach Out

AT&T used to have this ad "Reach out and touch someone". This was back in the 80s when they were much more dominant.

I was supposed to meet up with some folks last night, and that didn't work out. Why? Because I didn't have my phone. It was in my car. And I didn't know that until the next day.

Indeed, even when my phone is my apartment, I find it a pain. Usually, I'm sitting on the couch, and I have the phone elsewhere, which means I have to get up, and go get it.

In the old days, a home would have several phones because phones weren't portable. This would allow you to minimize the walking. You would think that portable phones, especially lightweight portable phones, would mean people would carry them everywhere.

Except when I'm at home, I find it a pain to have to carry a phone. I'd rather be in something more comfortable, say, a pair of shorts. If I'm sitting on the couch, I don't want to have to worry about crushing my phone. If I'm in the bedroom, I don't want to lug the phone from the living room to the bedroom.

I'm surprised there isn't a better way to handle this. Either, there should be a secure wireless way for my phone to go to other phones that stay in my home, or maybe, since I use my laptop a lot, it should go there.

Since my phone was in my car, and I didn't realize it was there, my friends were unable to contact me. That was partly a mental block. Sometimes you are trying to reach someone, and the only way you think of reaching of them is by phone.

But I'm the kind of person that prefers to be online a lot. So the other way to contact me is through IM, and less often, through email. That means a person ought to contact me in alternate ways.

Except that it doesn't occur to most people to try that. If the assumption is that you are always near your phone, but you're only at your computer every once in a while, then sending email seems like a very slow way, or using IM seems like a slow way. But for me, that's one of the possibilities.

And some people have the problem that their status is not accurate. Part of that is the problem of the IM client, which doesn't always detect that you're away. Part of that is because some people always say they're busy. They don't want other people to know what's up, or they know their friends would bug them if they weren't perpetually busy.

This busy/available status is called a person's (or their avatar's) presence.

This suggests that people want multiple ways to be reached. If I'm at home, there should be a way to send a message that is basically to the phone and to something in my home that doesn't move (like an electronic alert board) so if I'm at home, and I don't want my phone near me, people have a way to reach me.

Of course, some people don't want to be reached, but if you do, then you know.

I suppose I could coin a term and call it reachability, which is perfectly nerdy. But there should be tools to determine your own reachability, and to increase this through a one-stop method.

Being There

Once upon a time, if you wanted to get someplace you weren't familiar with, you needed a map. That required skill. You had to be able to read a map, which meant you needed to know where you were, then where you wanted to go (the street, the location on that street), then you had to plot a route between the two places, keeping in mind major roads, traffic, and the like.

Now route-planning can be complex. It may require taking notes, and if you're new to the location, you're simply guessing. You have no local domain knowledge.

This was the state of things for years, until the Internet came out, and maps could be put on webpages. Thus, places like Google Maps and Mapquest gave you the two locations (the start and the end), and it figures out a path. Of course, if you wanted to avoid toll roads, and sometimes I do, it wouldn't help out. Google Maps now lets you adjust routes.

This works fine if you get the map before you leave. What happens if you want to figure stuff out on the fly?

How do you get a computer in your car?

You use GPS.

And that's a completely different technology. It requires rather cheap (preferably free) accurate locations and quick.

The great news with GPS is that it can find you mostly whereever you are. The bad news is that it's terribly local, and the reason for that is because a GPS screen is tiny. It's a little bigger than a cell phone, but it's not a laptop screen. That means you can't see the level of detail of Google Maps which means although you know, to within a street, where you are, you have no idea how to re-navigate at a macro view.

Yeah, some GPS's are pretty good and give you a big map, but it's not as good as Google Maps, so you can't do planning the way you want it to.

So here I was, trying to go to a place to eat, and found my way to a Silver Diner. I had already paid a toll to get Reston, but no toll to get to the diner. On the return trip, the GPS insists I go back on the main road, and back to the toll. It took quite a few contortions to avoid this, and mostly by accident. I had no way to tell the GPS to avoid the toll. The best it does is to re-route to avoid traffic, and even then, it's completely guessing because it has no idea where the traffic is.

Clearly, the next step, and most expensive GPS have some support for this, is to use live traffic data, and let you know that this is what's happening.

And the step after that? Let the user tell the folks where things are happening. It's social networking on the road. This would allow auto-correction of wrong directions, which are typically wrong at the very last step (I was told to make a U-turn where one wasn't needed) or on new streets that aren't in the GPS.

I'm sure that's coming along too.

It's just amazing how a navigation method that hasn't changed in years, has now undergone a revolution in a matter of ten years.

Roddick and Babolat

I don't know what the most popular racquets have been in the past. The Jack Kramer Pro Staff was popular, but undoubtedly due to the number of years his racquet was available. Once upon a time, a racquet might be on the market 10-20 years, and sell well the whole time. These days, companies make new racquets every few years.

Another popular racquet was the Pro Staff 6.0 (or was it 6.1). Both Pete Sampras and Stefan Edberg used this racquet almost exclusively during their career. Jimmy Connors used it briefly when he abandoned the steel T-2000. Recall the 1984 Super Saturday? Connors pushed McEnroe to a fifth set. He used the Pro Staff. That was popular for a while too.

But I've seen one racquet that's been out there everywhere. Is it the racquet used by Roger Federer, which is an update to the Pro Staff, call the Pro Staff Six One (spelled out, rather than numerically written out)? Is it the racquet used by Djokovic? Or Nadal?

No, it's Andy Roddick's racquet. I have one of the older Pure Drive racquets. I see this racquet all over the place. Andy Roddick hasn't had the career that Federer has had, not even the career Nadal had.

But...he does have a huge serve. If chicks love the long ball, then tennis players love the big serve. It's hard to believe any rational tennis player would get a racquet based on how a pro hits it, but then, I've done the same, so I'm plenty guilty (I am willing to say, to my defense, that I pick racquets, these days, by pro styles, rather than whether I like the pro--though that doesn't explain why Roddick's racquet has done so well).

Roddick uses a racquet that now bears his name, undoubtedly because he put Babolat on the map. This isn't to say Roddick's racquet isn't a good racquet, because I think it's pretty good. But, I bet this is what happened. People saw Roddick and said "Here's a good looking guy with a huge serve. If I could get a fraction of his pace, I'd be set".

Yesterday, I saw a guy with a Roddick racquet, yet another of those proficient Asian players that seem to abound. But he was a lefty, and he clearly modeled his game not after Roddick, but after Rafa Nadal. And for an imitation, he's was strikingly effective. Sure, he doesn't cover the court like Rafa, not hit it with the same pace, but he's starting to be the kind of player that, when you stare at them on the court, you say "that's a good player".

Even his two-handed backhand appeared to be an imitation of the Nadal backhand.

In any case, pay attention to your neighbors and see if they have a Babolat.

End of an Era?

For a while, it looked like Federer would roll on to yet another major final. Up a break, and ready to serve for the set, when Djokovic broke back and broke again to win the first set, and pretty much, all those errors that Federer was making was coming to hurt him. Djokovic started to hit with confidence, especially on serve. His movement was fantastic, and he was incredibly steady.

Federer, on the other hand, was having a hard time moving to his right, and Djokovic was taking advantage of it. Federer's forehand flew a bit on him. And whenever Djokovic was down break point, he'd come up with a big serve, something Federer was unable to do.

Djokovic looked so good, that I wonder how Tsonga, who utterly demolished Nadal, will fare. Yesterday, I was confident that Tsonga would give a huge challenge to either.

In the press conference, Federer didn't feel so bad losing. He didn't feel 100%. I think he feels that had he been 100%, he would have done fine. Indeed, he felt that losing the first set allowed Novak to hit more freely, something he wouldn't have done otherwise.

People are already, minutes after the match is over, wondering if the days of Federer's dominance is over. Federer doesn't seem to think so, and probably plans to retool and think about what happened, and head back to the drawing board.

Dumbing Down?

Joel Spolsky has been complaining about the dumbing-down of computer science education. He's not the only one. Suddenly, out of the woodwork, you are getting folks who are agreeing with this. Is this problem specific to computer science? Do all the other disciplines have great teachers, and computer science awful ones?

There are a plethora of problems with computer science education, and I'll hit some of them myself, but the solutions are, frankly, very hard. Some of the issues are institutional, mired in the way academia views computer science education. Some of it is merely the mission of the university, seeking to educate as many students as possible, and the resulting mediocrity that's sure to come from that. Some of it is due to the incredible faddishness of the industry that pulls everyone in a million directions, and declares that their one obscure area of expertise is what every student should learn (a recent article proclaimed everyone should learn compilers--pretty soon, you hear everyone should learn algorithms or type theory or AI or network security or linguistics).

Let's begin with computer science education itself, and why it's causing problems. Perhaps the first problem with programming is that it's gotten quite complex. Object-oriented programming may seem particularly cool especially when it caught fire in industry in the late 80s, and universities struggled to keep up.

Object-oriented programming is tough compared to the simplicity of C or Pascal (and C isn't that easy either). But we continue to teach programming as if it were C or Pascal because academia doesn't want to admit that programming got difficult, and that two courses aren't enough.

Indeed, traditional CS had two courses for programming: CS1 and CS2. CS1 was learning the basics, which honestly, was control-flow (if statements, loops), arrays, and functions. No classes, and maybe a touch of pointers. CS2 was data structures: stacks, heaps, trees, and pointers. That was all you needed.

CS courses then often taught assembly, which has disappeared (and to be honest, if it returned "as is", it would not give enough insight into low-level programming as some would imagine).

One could easily argue that object oriented programming requires at least a third course to fully comprehend programming in it. A third semester alone is useful for a horrid language like C++ where templates, virtual functions makes reading and debugging a nightmare (and memory management).

And we haven't even talked about threads!

The other part academia hasn't particularly cared for is that software engineering has become a discipline. True, many a department now have software engineering professors, but academic software engineering is a strange beast, often divorced a bit from the reality of real software engineering, and then further lacking the respect from other more mathematical disciplines that have been around longer.

Indeed, many other computer science research areas look at programming as a mere tool, useful as a means to an end, and not an end to itself.

Software developers have to deal with a lot of issues these days. Let's hit a few of the basics. At the very least, you now need to know version control. There used to be RCS and SCCS, which both sucked. Now there's CVS and Subversion, and now a whole spate of distributed version control systems. It takes a while just to understand how version control works, especially the nastiness of branching and merging.

Academics who haven't dealt with version control (fortunately, fewer and fewer) find this subject painful. What does this have to do with programming? And, in a very real sense, they are right. It has very little do with programming, and everything to do with software development. And because it's tool-based, and because we still haven't fully gotten it right, people are going to come up with one system after another, and as soon as you master CVS, you waste time trying to learn git and other bits of arcania just to get by.

But then, there's the new trend (and it is a trend now) towards agile programming. That means unit testing. That means test driven development. That means behavior driven development. And, oh the plethora of tolls. Programming has become so convenient to the masses that the best of them produce wonderful tools. And now, people have to pay attention to their existence! If you were doing Rails development, you might play with RSpec or autotest, tools that are only about a year old, and you'd have to keep your ear pretty close to the ground to keep up. That's tough when an academic wants to do research rather than keep track of the tabloids.

Software development has lead to people using terms like "requirements gathering" and "test document" and "test plan". Documentation has gotten big, even if people routinely do a bad job of it.

Let's briefly talk testing. This used to be something a programmer does. Indeed, it's still something a programmer does. But now, there are separate folks that handle quality assurance, so much so, that it's given the name quality assurance, and there's a whole spate of terminology and tools surrounding testing! And the mentality of testing is quite different from coding. What was considered something a conscientious programmer would do has now become its own discipline, almost worthy of a major.

Speaking of tools, what about usability? The web did a marvelous job exposing the need to write usable software. The average person doesn't understand software so much, and can quickly leave one webpage for another. A webpage has to be visually appealing, yet easy to use, and preferably both. Once upon a time, people figured the only people using programmers were other programmers. Thus, beauty, comprehensibility, and all those things people now care about were a complete afterthought.

Did we mention how faddish the industry is? Right now, dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have caught everyone's fancy. And while those languages make great strides towards wide acceptability, people are already looking for the next great panacea of a language. Whispers of Erlang, Haskell, O'Caml, Scala abound. Even if we stick to Python and Ruby, both have enough magic in it that you can do a lot of non-obvious magic.

And, one of Java's downsides is that it's so verbose that people need a good IDE to write code in the language. You simply didn't need a decent IDE for languages like Pascal. Eclipse itself is so complex, you need hundreds of pages to scratch the surface of what it can do. It's integrated with tools to test, use version control, refactor(!). Things no one much cared about 20 years ago, so that people could focus on, you know, programming (I know--it's all programming, isn't it?). Thus, a good programmer now has to master a complex IDE, and one that's not likely to be around 20 years from now.

Once upon a time, most programs didn't play well with each other. But now, people extend languages all the time. Thus, people write tons of libraries for Python and Ruby. You have to worry about what libraries exist, and how to use them. There are people that now link in other people's code. A good programmer has to locate all sorts of software, and evaluate them and decide whether to use it or not. In the good old days, you'd simply write the code yourself (badly) or simply do with a bad solution (your own).

Oh, what about open source? Want to explain the gazillion variations of open source licensing and what it means to the average programmer?

It's a big world out there. Want to explain internationalization, and how it affects your code? Is your code ready for the world market?

How about handling all those timezones and dates? That also falls under internationalization. As does, of course, Unicode (and that it's not just one code, but a family of codes).

How about databases? You don't talk about all those web frameworks without databases? And web frameworks? And XML? These are now part of the day-to-day toolset a programmer needs to know.

And that's outside of all the usual stuff academics generally care about, like algorithms, compilers, computation theory, AI, bio-computing, numerical analysis, and so forth, most of which, the average developer knows little about.

All of these topics could fill courses and course and courses that a typical computer science department doesn't even want to tackle. Why? Because five years from now, another new trend will sweep in, and people will have to learn again. And will those changes be an improvement? More than likely, not enough to offset the headaches learning it.

Now, here's what I'd love all the critics to do. Teach an intro course. Decide that everyone is an idiot, and tell it to their faces. Then, be told that you still have to get them to learn something, and feel what it's like, what it's really like, to have to get people to learn that don't want to learn. If it will make the visualization easier, imagine it's your own child, refusing to learn, wondering why it's so hard, and why there's so much crap, rather than that superstar you just hired who can't get enough of this new stuff, and can take anything you throw at him or her, and turn out magic.

Spolsky complains about the dumbing down of the curriculum, but it's only because Java doesn't do it for him. He knows that to get the speed he wants, he's dealing with languages that will give it to him. Even he's not crazy enough to believe that coding in assembly will offset the productivity losses coding in something that horrid. Don't you think that if Java ran ten times faster than C++, he'd be hapier to give up all the crap associated with C++. But because he needs stuff that runs better, runs faster, he realizes that his coders have to know these grungy details.

Compare computer science to math, where irrelevant details are left out, and where people learn deep concepts, to computer science, where dealing with complexity has lead us to fads of the day, as good as we have now, but likely to be replaced with something new, and more and more and more code out there that we have to deal with.

Now, let's take a step back. Breathe.

We can teach as much of this as we want, but learning isn't simply a bunch of concepts that you teach. It's a worldview. When you are given a problem, what do you do? Suppose someone tells you to port a device driver. Do you even know what a device driver is? Or what it means to port? And yet, some people can take something that vague, and get code to work, and someone else will say that they were never taught that in college, and how are they supposed to deal with this?

And the fact of the matter is that, as much as the industry complains, unless they are prepared to head into academia (itself, very territorial, and having its own idea about what students need), academia can basically ignore what is being said. First, academia is so distributed that most professors couldn't even tell you what courses are required for their own students to graduate. They barely care about their own class, and don't even think about how their class fits in the overall plan. To get them to work together and make such changes, especially changes that are likely to come every five years, is to against their nature that knowledge shouldn't be a total fad.

And it's contrary to the mission of universities which is to graduate students. Most software pundits would have 90% of computer science majors jettisoned, despite the fact that mediocre programmers are often needed to do a lot of work. They would have their other courses jettisoned, because there's no time to worry about all those humanities and such. If every major took that attitude, most students would not even be in college. Since most universities are in the business of graduating students, then each major has to worry about how to get students who don't understand pointers very well to do well enough to get out.

Imagine it's your job to educate all the students who want to be computer science majors. The mediocre ones and the brilliant ones. Then, your view of what they should learn changes, when you realize that it's hard to even get the basic programming down, beyond all this other crap you have to learn to be decent in the field.

On Breakfast

Americans have been skipping breakfast for years. In the rush, rush to get to work, and not wanting to prepare anything elaborate, breakfast has become the forgotten meal. Breakfast has become simpler than ever.

The "traditional" breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast, has given way to cereal and milk. Not nearly as appetizing, but really convenient.

Except it isn't. There's still many a person who jets out the door, and head to a McDonald's or a Starbucks for the bare minimum coffee to get them going in the morning.

This, after all the ads that used to tell people how you should eat a healthy breakfast before going out, that it helps you get through the morning. Everyone, in theory, understands this is so, but finds the necessity to head to work right off the bat as a time-saver.

But, in other countries, such as (the only country I ever bust out) India, breakfast is still seen as vitally important. People just don't feel right if they don't eat breakfast. And, rather than being the same repetitive cereal, day after day, Indians will often expect variety in breakfast, and not just for weekend changeup (typical Americans opting for pancakes if they choose to make it).

My feeling is that the decline of cooking in general has also affected breakfast. If you don't want to spend 30 minutes to an hour cooking, and would rather pick up something fast in 5 minutes, then even the effort to make cereal might feel too laborious.

In fact, Americans who do eat breakfast don't even think of variety. Too early in the morning. So, they make the same thing each morning. Variety, if it comes at all, might be in the choice of cereal, or the choice of flavored oatmeal.

If you had to reimagine breakfast, what might you do?

Tipsarevic

In the 80s, shortly after Borg retired, there was a spate of young Swedish tennis players that dotted the top 100 players. This, from a country that barely has 9 million people. 9 million! The United States has something like 250 million people, which is over 25 times as populous as Sweden.

And yet, Sweden cranked out players like Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Anders Jarryd, Henrik Sundstrom, Joachim Nystrom, and perhaps half a dozen others. While these players claim to have drawn some inspiration from Borg, who was Sweden's star player from the mid 70s to early 80s (probably the height of tennis popularity, due, perhaps as much to an exhibition between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, as to anything else in the game).

But Borg was a loner. He played Davis Cup rarely, except at the beginning of his career, and kept his distance from most of the rest of the Swedes, who were all best buddies and rather modest about their considerable achievements.

This success was mostly confined to the men's game. You can hardly name any Swedish women players.

These things seem to go in cycles. The Spaniards have done well since the 1990s with players like Sergei Bruguera, Carlos Moya, and nowadays, world number 2, Rafael Nadal.

But the country du jour are the Serbians. The Croatians have done well, most notably, Goran Ivanisevic. However, their Yugoslav counterparts have only had a good player in Monica Seles, and she often hushed up about her heritage, as the Serbians, at the time, were into some ethnic cleansing, which is basically genocide.

But, you know, Americans barely register this kind of thing when there are no images being blared in their faces, and when it's, you know, over there, overseas. Americans are so American-centric that they barely pay attention to starvation in Africa, conflicts in Europe, atrocities in Southeast Asia.

Even as Americans have learned to become far more aware of the world, understanding this phenomenon called Bollywood, the burgeoning Indian film industry, being more PC, there's still a lot of the world Americans willfully ignore, with the news media more than complicit in this jingoistic fervor.

So, with these past events firmly in the past, Serbian tennis has enjoyed a resurgence. It's really hard to call it a resurgence given that Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the rebel child of the Communist countries, and many Soviet bloc countries avoided playing world tennis for many years, until the mid 80s, when players like Andrei Chesnokov, Andrei Cherkasov, and most importantly, Nathalia Zvereva, who famously waved a winner's check on national TV, a check she said she couldn't keep because of the Russian federation, which eventually yielded fewer restrictions, more take-home pay, and eventually, Russians back in the top ranks of tennis.

In those days, you had Bobo Zivojinovic and Monica Seles, and they were the forefront of Serbian tennis. These days, you have Novak Djokovic, but you also have Janko Tipsarevic who is giving Roger Federer all he can handle.

He looks a lot like a grungy Novak, with his funky glasses that resemble racquetball glasses, and his scraggly facial hair, almost as if Djokovic put on a disguise and came on court. Tipsarevic is three years older than his 20 year old compatriots.

Many Serbian players train outside of Serbia, having gone to Europe or the United States. (By the way, there have been a ton of challenges by Tipsarevic, who has won a surprising number of them).

While the men have fared quite well, the women have done even better for themselves. Ana Ivanovic is ranked number 3. Jelena Jankovic is ranked number 4. True, there's no other player til you reach about the mid 200s, but having two top ten players in the women's and three players in the top 100 (barely), with a population that's maybe a million people more than Sweden, and you realize that this is quite an accomplishment, especially as many have had to train outside of Serbia.

Occasionally, you have a player like world number 1, Roger Federer, who comes from a country (Switzerland), that is more famous for chocolates and cheese than for producing top players, and you wonder, where the heck are the other Swiss players? There's Roger, and that seems to be it (not entirely true, but other players pale in the glow of a dominant number 1).

But give this to the Serbs, they've got a lot of fight.

This is one reason (other than a nap late in the evening) that I'm watching a Federer-Tipsarevic match that has already gone to two tiebreaks, and one where Federer has ample chances to break, but hasn't fared really well.

Faith and Hope in Charity

I have a friend who works at a company specializing in charities. Not in any one particular charity, but in many of them. It's a little bit like Esurance, that website that allows you to pick one of many insurance policy (from, presumably, multiple companies). The idea is pretty simple. You pick the charity you want to give to, and you give to it. They serve as a kind of middleman, providing some Webby widgets that can be attached to a blog or somesuch.

Here's the problem. People don't like giving to charity. I mean, not with the same passion that they want to give to other things, such as food, electronic goods, even presidential candidates.

I suppose the problem with charity is that people want to know it's doing some good, and yet, they don't have so much time to really pay attention to how their money is actually doing. Then, there's the fact that most people prefer things that benefit themselves first before it benefits someone else in some far away country.

People are, however, willing to contribute if it somehow combines something they care about. For example, Dulles Airport sponsored a plane pull. You get a team of twenty to contribute about 20 bucks, and they can all have an opportunity to pull a plane maybe twenty feet.

It's an odd task, but something a team could do, and there's some fun, despite the oppressive heat. And you can say that you are doing all this for charity.

Somehow combining something fun with charity works better than simply giving money to charity. For example, many people like video games. So why not have a competition on the Web (say, Worlds of Warcraft) where you play in a tournament, and part of the proceeds go to charity? Or how about online poker with charity?

For that matter, despite the fact that most charities try to maintain a wholesome image, why not work with the porn industry? People love porn, and spend money like crazy. Is there a way to combine the two? It seems like an odd combination, but why not?

The point is that charity, in and of itself, is not hugely motivating to most people, and that people can be motivated by other things, and then have charity as part of that. It seems like you just need a bit of imagination to make that happen.

The Evolution of Tennis

The Tennis Channel (or now just Tennis Channel) has been showing old Australian Open matches. Right now, they are showing Chris Evert against Martina from 1982. At that point, Evert had not won the Australian (that was her first win, and she'd win it one more time, and reach the finals a few other times).

At that point, Evert was still using a wood racquet, though it appeared to be a midsize wood racquet. Martina had already started playing with her Yonex rectangular racquet, and she was probably the most prominent user of this Japanese racquet.

The change in racquets really affected women's play. Evert didn't hit particularly hard, and she wasn't fast, but she wasn't so slow either. To be fair, Martina didn't serve so hard either, though she spun the ball wide due to her left-handed serve. And let's face it, until Mauresmo won Wimbledon a few years ago, Martina was the last true serve and volleyer that was any good.

There are several changes that happen to the game, and it's a credit to Chris Evert that she stayed competitive as it was happening. In particular, with the racquet change, people started to hit a lot harder. Originally, this was Steffi, but then Monica, Jennifer, Lindsay, Mary, and the Williams sisters. The women now hit with more spin as well, though not the kind of topspin shots the men do.

Of course, even as I'm critical of their games, they were still awfully good, and far, far better than many players today. By many players, I mean the average weekend hacker, or even the above average weekend hacker. Indeed, while I feel the women have improved their games, Chris Evert and Martina would probably be in the top 30, if they played at their peaks. The power would make it tough for both women to be successful, at least, at the very top of the game. Neither were natural topspin hitters, so adapting their games would have been tough.

Last night, they showed Henri Leconte play Mansour Bahrami. Bahrami is a player from Iran and I believe never played professionally, or if he didn, he was never ranked highly. But the guy had good hands and was humorous, and certainly holds his own against seniors, so I think that's the reason you see him play seniors, which otherwise, prefers to not allow players that weren't highly ranked to play (one could imagine a college player that never made the pros who still is in great shape, being able to beat the stars of yesteryear).

Leconte looks really old, but he still has great hands. The intervening years haven't really helped his consistency though. You forget when players had such marvelous reflexes because they don't play the net anymore.

Leconte had one of those unusual builds. He was all chest, and not much legs or arms. Huge upper body. But he didn't think particularly, and he was very much a rhythm player. On a given day, more like, on a given set, he could beat anyone. But he wasn't so consistent. People forget that Lendl, as hard as he hit, could trade 20-30 shots with players. He eventually beat Connors by just being more patient, waiting for the error.

Connors wasn't even as inconsistent as Leconte. Connors would make 15 shots in a row, but push him to 20 or so, and those flat shots, with such little margin for error, were prone to break down.

The flat shot has pretty much disappeared. Almost no one hits it now. I remember loving to watch Kimiko Date play. She was one of the few players who hit flat, and she'd take the ball so quickly off the ground, and switch direction so quickly that people couldn't keep up. But she was also a head-case. She wasn't as mentally tough as Graf or Seles, otherwise I think she'd be a solid bet to be in the top 3.

Really, the flat shot disappearing, the harder hitting due to big racquets and the disappearance of good serve and volley players (or even coming into net) has been the key changes to tennis, some (especially serve and volley) are disappointing to watching the sport.

Searching for Wireless

My parents don't live much in the Internet age. You and I might be able to surf endlessly on the Web for hours at a time and call that entertainment. My parents are old school. They prefer to read newspapers. Their concession to modern society is getting Chinese programming, which they can now do via Dish TV.

Even this is a minor concession. Most content providers, filled to brim with channels, give people a small tool to try to manage the plethora of channels called a guide. The guide is tiny, sporting a few channels at a time, but it lets you know what's on, to the extent the stations don't change the shows on them last minute.

Parents don't use that. They have a card, and that card tells them what channel is what. Guide is a foreign concept, and they haven't adopted it yet. It's not they aren't smart. They're plenty smart. It's that they aren't particularly adaptable. The generation of computer users, especially savvy ones like you and me, that find some mild entertainment from blogs, are able to navigate the minefield of modern UI design that tries to instill in us the necessity to do something new.

What software exists out there that doesn't require a tome the size of the Torah to use? How much of this software is discoverable? We have "wizards" to help us install stuff, but no wizards to help us use stuff. Indeed, we must learn how to use our software.

Recently, I was looking at my DVDs telling me how to use my camera. What camera is that? It's a Nikon D40. This camera, so reviews tell me, has one of the best UIs of any camera out there. The folks at Nikon have tried hard, and it seems successfully, to make a usable digital SLR. Let's face it, people wade through f-stops (seriously, folks, get rid of this term and replace it with something like depth-of-field, or something more intuitive and useful) and ISOs and zooms. I learned this stuff when I was in junior high or high school. And yet, with the digital revolution, I have to learn about white balancing and SDs vs. Compact Flashes vs. Sony's idiosyncratic MemoryStick.

I suppose I could use the dial-up, but I've become helpless to wireless. I want to open my laptop and go. I want it to connect to the Internet effortlessly. I want downloads that sing. I'd love to say that we live in a country of free Internet, but only pockets exist, and only the hours they are open.

Airports are the place that suffer the most. Most places aren't Portland or Ithaca with their enlightened view of free wireless Internet for all. Portland does one better and has it free in many spots within the city.

It's funny that old school was 15 years ago, before the Web became what it was, before we had real bandwidth. How many people live lives on the Internet now? How many can live without surfing to a reddit or a Digg or their favorite sites? It's a small number, but it grows, and puts a significantly larger number of people in the have-nots who wonder how someone can stare at a computer that long, how someone can derive entertainment from bits flying across the air.

So here I am at Panera, connected for a moment. For no one can explain the Matrix.

You have to see it for yourself.

Internet and Films

I was just reading a review by Mike D'Angelo about a film called Reservation Road, which is a story of a lawyer, who gets into an accident and kills a kid while driving, but leaves the scene, and is later asked by the father to find who did it, and try to sue the heck out of the guy.

The point Mike finds fascinating is not the odd trap that the lawyer finds himself, and how he will deal with this situation, of a furious father asking him for help, and not knowing that the lawyer was the guy.

It's that the guy uses the Internet, mainly Google, to find information, and to find support in moments of grief, reaching out to strangers, rather than to his own wife.

The Internet is treated in a non-chalant way, instead of the way it's dealt with in older films like, say, Copycat, which uses huge fonts, and huge text so you can see the chat, or Mission Impossible, which uses a graphic of an email send randomly out by a flipping envelope. Or even more obvious film plots like You've Got Mail.

It's very much like the difference between the cyberpunk novels and Asimov novels. Asimov SF is very fascinated with the technology that Asimov has invented in his head, and the characters talk about it. In cyberpunk novels, the world is the way it is, and the people inhabiting it merely use the technology. There's no explanation of why or how the technology fully came about, even as the stories themselves to emphasize technology.

Unlike, say, Star Wars. Star Wars treats technology even more off-handedly. No one even bothers to talk about where this technology comes from. Who builds the ships? Where's the labor? Where are the smart people? All completely ignored to tell the story. But where the viewer is constantly being shown amazing images of a kind of future society (or the past, in the Star Wars mythos), it's a far remove from the culture we know today.

Certainly cell phones already make part of our current society, but the Internet has affected people more profoundly than films have represented, and in perhaps ways that are more subtle than film-makers would like. For example, people might really get into Facebook.

I've been using it lately to find some people I haven't met in a while, hoping, they, too, might have gotten on. Some folks have, while others, thinking that this is for kids, have avoided it. But it acts a bit better than LinkedIn for keeping up with people. Where's the dramatic value in that?

And more interestingly is how people are more willing to meet new people out of the blue, rather than simply restricting their circle of friends to merely the workplace or college. In that respect, the Internet allows people to meet others more easily, although possibly more superficially. It's hard to make a really good film that strikes the right balance, portraying accurately what happens to people, without seeming like some weird cautionary tale (such as the many movies or tv episodes about cyberstalking).

In particular, we now have the ability to find information about all sorts of things, from restaurants, to directions, to the origins of a holiday, to information about people, should they, for example, choose to blog about it. This is something that wasn't there before, but is there now, and the film industry has yet to popularly capture this.

And that's not even including those who love MMORPGs. I'm sure filmmakers know such players exist, but can't even imagine how that all works, or how to craft an interesting story from it.

But perhaps this is the first of more films that will treat the topic more maturely, more matter-of-factly.

Why Facebook Works

A few weeks ago, perhaps even a bit longer than that, I was invited to get a Facebook account. I had never thought about using, say, MySpace, but I had been somewhat intrigued by Facebook as a cleaner version of MySpace.

But until I started using Facebook, I didn't realize what was its appeal.

To take stock of this, let me backtrack a bit. One of the earliest social networking sites of the ilk of MySpace was LiveJournal. LiveJournal has been around a while, and it focuses on one thing: blogging. You can't do that much more than blog. You can add friends, but mostly it's just their names.

MySpace also allowed for blogging, but you don't have to if you don't want. You can put some information about yourself. It has a few attractive features. First, you can add music fairly easily. There's an annoying player that starts off when you visit a page. And, then the other part, as far as I can tell, was the list of friends, which you showed off like collecting cards, and these two aspects, music and a long list of friends, seemed to appeal to lots of teens (and horrid backgrounds).

Facebook seems to dispense with blogging altogether. It's not easy to point to why Facebook works, but in a nutshell, I'd say it's the constant feed.

You have a feed of what all your friends are doing, and this constant activity lets you see who becomes friends with whom, and what groups or networks people are joining, what games they might be playing, and then you can "poke" people as well, forcing interaction in the simplest of ways. Facebook is kind of a mishmash of features from stuff like IRC (in slow motion) and game-playing.

I go to do two things. First, to add more friends to see what they are doing, and then to play this movie game, which I do partly to annoy someone else, and partly because it's mildly addictive (and not very satisfying, I must admit, though it's decidedly clever by not telling you what the top scorers have score, but merely telling you your rank).

And there is a twitter like status bar letting others know what you are up to. In a weird way, it's news of your friends, and it feels like this idea grew organically rather than being completely planned. This feed idea works even as many people who use Facebook don't even know what a feed (e.g., an RSS feed) is.

I talked to someone who's younger than I am, but has a pretty busy schedule who feels (correctly) that he has no time for this. In the end, Facebook is a time-sink, whether you are interacting with your friends, or doing individual activities.

I suppose Facebook also appeals to Web 2.0 folks, because it has the fade effects, and overlays, and so forth. Stuff you expect to see in typical Web 2.0 sites.

I dunno how long this will last, but I came to it late, and people still seem to be doggedly involved, even as many have abandoned MySpace, partly because blogging is way too time consuming for most people, whereas a Twitter like status is low barrier to entry. Rather than spew paragraph after paragraph, it's only one line, and the others read it, and possibly react to that one line.

I'll fill you in if I figure out more about why Facebook works so well.

Silicon Implants

In the last, oh, say two or three years, you can't avoid silicon. This ain't silicon chips that made Silicon Valley famous (well, I suppose it is). Silicon's first appearance in kitchen items occurred in silicon oven mitts. They looked like rubber, but apparently could prevent heat from getting through.

Once you saw them in mitts, they've shown up everywhere. Knife handles and pots and pan handles in particular. But I see them for collapsible colanders (a recent innovation) and even a drain cover for the sink (I bought one).

Most of these companies tout how comfortable these silicon handles are. But I find them slightly creepy feeling, like some kind of odd latex. I kinda like the feel of metal. I think I saw one for an ice cube tray which looks all rubbery and I wonder how easy it is to pry out.

Look for it the next time you explore the kitchen section of a store.

In Your Facebook

A year ago, we were besieged by MySpace. It seemed like every kid wanted a MySpace page. Most of these MySpacers had the artistic talent of a hyperactive monkey in a room of paint-filled balloons. The resulting backgrounds were garish. Entering the page caused tunes to play, and you had to hunt around to turn the damn thing off. But it made it easy for kids to write a webpage. Unlike, say, Livejournal, it didn't have to be about blogging. It emphasized getting your friends to declare you as a friend. All the kind of high school popularism that infects who desperately crave this faux attention and care, treating friendships like merit badges. The neediest guy of all being founder Tom Anderson. At one point, everyone, by default, had Tom as a friend.

Did I also mention that MySpace is ugly?

The "grown-up" counterpart to MySpace is Facebook. Now, for a while, you couldn't easily get a Facebook account. It really was aimed at college students, and you were supposed to be invited, or something, to enter a Facebook network. Eventually, they let high school students create accounts, then everyone.

Everyone seems to say Facebook is a far cleaner version of MySpace, but it's become something of a social networking Web 2.0 darling. Check out TechMeme today and you'll find several articles about Facebook, most likely (I haven't fully checked it out) because you can write plug-ins for Facebook, and this has lead geekdom to do so.

Now, you might think that having a site that permits plugins is awfully geeky. Who would ever use such a thing? But here's the key: you don't need that many people to write plugins. A few is enough, and it allows the geeky part of the community to contribute to this online community.

Of course, I'm plenty late to the Facebook phenomenon. Heck, I'm still writing on Blogger! But I like to point this out to people even more lost about the trends.

Over time, I figure that's what I want to do. Check out trends and write about them. Normally, by the time I notice, it's already a trend. After all, you have to see it a lot, and by then, you know it's too late.

Even so, it's a good record for me to note it down.

Twitter

Twitter used to be called Twttr, at least, I thought it was. It's hard to find evidence of this.

It's the latest new thing, and as with many latest new things, I find it through Dave. Dave somehow manages to figure out the pulse of new things. He told me about Flickr before Flickr was big (and arguably, it's not that big).

What is Twitter? If you have some IM buddies that are younger than a certain age, they often list their away message letting you know where they are at any particular place and time. Modern youth do not seem that concerned about privacy, perhaps an outgrowth of reality TV shows like Big Brother, where people actually want to be filmed 24 hours a day.

Indeed, the latest online example of this is justin.tv where former Kiko employee, Justin Kan, straps a small camera on a cap, and films whatever he sees all day long. When he sleeps, he aims he camera at his bed, and using night vision, you can see him sleep, which is modestly dull.

The lesson one learns from having a camera is that no matter how boring someone's life is, someone is always watching. Two things have pushed Justin.tv to the next level beyond the cam sites that were popular a decade ago (JenniCam, being the most famous person) are the quality of video, which is much better than the old days when images refreshed once in twenty seconds, and even the best of them, Camarades, would stutter all the time, and that Justin takes the camera everywhere. In its day, the cams were mostly stationary, in the room of the cam star. When the star was not around, the room was empty. A viewer would get a terribly limited view of the person's world. Oh yes, there's also sound. Many cams of its day lacked sound.

Right now, due to its increased popularity, a hundred people might be watching at any one time, which means it's become increasingly difficult to see any video at all.

But I digress.

Twitter is much simpler. The idea is to have a website where you can update everyone by any means necessary. You can go to the website itself and put a note on what you are doing right then and there. You can send a text message from your phone. I think you can even IM to it.

And, while I haven't checked it out, you can keep up in similar ways. If I want to keep up with Dave's every move, I could probably route his updates to my phone. Now, he doesn't actually update enough to make that realistic, and he may indeed get tired of it very quickly.

But for now, Twitter seems to have caught the fancy of many people, especially at this thing called SXSW (which is short for "South by Southwest", a riff on a Hitchcock film) which I believe is hosted in Austin Texas each year.

Why would people want to update everyone on what they are up to? And why would people care? Yet, people have done this. Perhaps someone addicted to Twitter can enlighten me.

I'm just here noting it down, even as others have already noted it too.