Time for our favorite essay device: compare and contrast. Article 1: The New York Times: For Women in Silicon Valley, It Seems Like Strikeout.com. Article 2: The New York Observer: They’re Single, Ambitious, Worth Millions, But Can New York Women Download Their Megabyte Egos?. Article 1 mentions a five to one ratio of men to women in the Silicon Valley dating scene. The men complain about gold-diggers who are just trolling for millionaires. One well-traveled male says “the women are quite stuck up here.” Oh how wonderful. But though men have a hard time finding a date, the women don’t seem to be coming up with much either: “the good guys that are available don’t come out of their cubicles.” In Article 2, various male Silicon Alley execs reveal their dating issues. “I have two people I dated in the last three years who dated me specifically to leverage their careers.” They also echo the gold digger sentiment, with one guy stating that if a woman starts talking about charities like she wants to be the next Melinda Gates, she’s only interested in dollar signs. Meanwhile, the women complain about the web workaholics: “Thirty minutes after the millennium, my boyfriend was back on the computer.” and “if you’re looking for someone who’ll be home by 7 to cook dinner with you after work–someone to share a sane, stable life–Internet people, men and women alike, are probably not for you.” To me, none of this sounds new. It’s the same old themes, played out with the money and atmosphere of the new Internet economy. Men and women have been miscommunicating about dating and relationships for eons. And using each other to get ahead. And working too late. On both coasts and everywhere in between. (Observer link via Robot Wisdom. For another take on the NY Times article, read Salon’s criticism of the New York media for jumping on the Silly Valley gold digger idea.)

The Pulitzer Prizes for 2000 have been awarded. Where’s that extra time I need to polish my short stories? Oh right. I started a web log instead. :-)

Feed pointed to a fascinating and educational essay on book publshing by Jason Epstein, editor-in-chief of Random House. It’s long, but worth setting aside time to read if you are interested in the evolution of publishing and how he believes it will change with new technologies. He begins with a nostalgic trip back to his earlier days at Random House when he had an office in a lovely mansion and authors such as Dr. Seuss and Ralph Ellison would drop in for a spell. His details regarding the current state of the publishing world are harbingers of vast changes to come. Previously, publishers’ bread and butter were their backlists of steady sellers. But “the retail market for books is now dominated by a few large bookstore chains whose high operating costs demand high rates of turnover and therefore a constant supply of best sellers, an impossible goal but one to which publishers have become perforce committed.” There is a concentration of authors amongst the bestsellers. “Between 1986 and 1996 the share of all books sold represented by the thirty top best sellers nearly doubled as retail concentration increased. But within roughly the same period 63 percent of the one hundred best-selling titles were written by a mere six writers—Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, and Danielle Steele” And what will become of the brick and mortar bookstores in the face of ecommerce? “Like shrines and other sacred meeting places bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.” He says that readers may prefer bookstores as they prefer eating out in restaurants instead of ordering in, but the convenience of online ordering “will profoundly affect current book marketing practice, to say nothing of the effect on readers and writers.” The role of the publisher could change markedly and perhaps be collapsed into that of the writers and their business managers and agents. “The obstacles imposed between readers and writers by traditional publishing technologies — a system of improvisations accumulated over generations from the vagaries and impasses of obsolete forms of production and distribution — will wither away.”

Wheee…no longer do I have to channel Seth. He can channel himself with his new Entropic Decay log. Phew!

I’ve been thinking about ringing phones. Well, more specifically, I’ve been wondering if the phone will always ring in the future. With AOL Instant Messenger, if someone is on my buddy list, the “caller’s” first message will just pop up in the window. How does their new voice chat paradigm work? Does that “ring”? With my always-with-me personal communication device of the future, ideally I will be able to choose how I want incoming communiques to be announced. The two variables would be what I’m doing at the moment (if I’m in an interruptable meeting, I may want my device to vibrate in all cases) and who is calling (if it’s my S.O. and I’m doing work at my desk, I won’t mind getting their voice immediately, if it’s a cold-call recruiter, they should go into voicemail). Of course, if the device itself is intelligent, it could figure that out for me automatically, but I probably wouldn’t mind personalizing most of it myself. There are some technical issues, of course, with having a ringing phone vs. an instant voice come over the wire, but I assume those are just vestiges of old technology paradigms and that the “interrupt method” of the future can be flexible.

There are things we do that are so ingrained into our system that they’ve become part of our subconscious and we no longer realize we do them. I discovered yesterday, at Fantasia 2000 at The Tech’s IMAX theatre, that when I sit down in an auditorium or theatre, I look for an exit sign. Just in case. The IMAX theatre didn’t have any I could see. Which was nice since it would be a distraction to the immersive experience. But I spent a few minutes feeling a bit uncomfortable that some part of my brain didn’t know where to head in case of a fire. Fantasia is quite good. My favorite was the final piece, Firebird, since that was the most original, in both artistic expression and music selection. My main complaint was the overabundance of piano selections. There are plenty of other fascinating pieces for other solo instruments and orchestra. Maybe next time.

Amazon.com of the not-so-distant future. I wonder if they have any taxonomy experts on staff. (via kottke)

Driving home from work yesterday doing Lilly’s commuting activity #7 (think of a personalized license plate for myself), I suddenly thought of an awesome one: NOSPOON (as in The Matrix, get it?). So I’m feeling all self-satisfied because I can never think of a plate configuration that I would actually use, but, of course, California contains 90% of the geek and movie population in the world and NOSPOON is already taken, according to the DMV database. I wonder if it’s on a black 1965 Lincoln Continental. And, though I was sure of it, I checked anyway, and domains nospoon.com, net, and org are already taken. That’s the problem with being a geek. We all think alike. Darn hive mind.

These Fisher Price Little People dressed as TV and movie characters had me laughing for many minutes. (Remember, I’m easily amused.) (via Kestrel’s Nest)

PC Week is jumping onto the ubiquitous “e” bandwagon and changing its name to eWEEK. I used to read PC Week’s print issue religiously about five years ago, accumulating large, slippery stacks of it in my cube. I enjoyed Christine Comaford’s column which covered various topics on client/server development back when I was working on that oh-so cutting edge technology. Christine now appears to be keeping busy with her VC firm, Artemis Ventures, but her old Christine.com site is still up. Losing the “PC” in the PC Week name made me think about outdated store names like “Record World”. And then the strangest thing happened. I typed www.eweek.com in my browser and was redirected to www.simple.com. Then I tried www.recordworld.com and ended up again at www.simple.com. I thought maybe I had miskeyed something and gone back a page, but I tried recordworld again with the same results. So I did a whois search and found out that eweek.com and recordworld.com are owned by the same folks, who, obviously, also own simple.com. That’s got to be the oddest thing that’s happened to me on the web — at least this week. It’s as if the web itself is validating my oblique trains of thought. The web connects all.