I hate to post a personal downer but it’s my log and I’ll cry if I want to, so here goes. I’ve found out that an old friend of mine, Kirsten, has died of breast cancer. She was only 30 years old. I lost touch with her after high school, but I remember her as the sweetest, nicest person I knew. I never saw her being mean to anyone. Do something for me and for her today: contact someone you’ve lost touch with, someone you’ve been meaning to write to, but you never make the time to. Do not wait any longer. I tend to heal with humor, so here’s the infamous Kirsten quote that her best friend used under her own yearbook photo: “Is there a problem officer?”

Lots o’ folks are crowing about patents, especially with the call to boycott Amazon.com. My feelings about patents have always been the same (patent law absolutely needs to be altered to deal with the nature of software development), but my attitude has shifted a little. When I was at Lotus, I hoped they would lose their user interface suit against Borland. At GRiD, I proudly displayed my LPF “Apple as a snake” button in my cube. At Brio Technology, I declined to be listed as an inventor on a patent, thereby horrifying a lawyer acquaintance of mine who felt I was breaking the law (the rule of thumb is if you’ve touched the code at all, you’re on the patent), stupefying a few friends, and missing out on a resume enhancer. My current philosophy is that if someone wants to use the law to their advantage, I’m not going to penalize them for it (ergo, I’m not boycotting Amazon). But I still don’t feel right taking advantage of those laws myself. To each his or her own.

I noticed a scary bit about this autonomous vacuum cleaner (via Eatonweb): notice that they have a “patent pending” on their “mood indicator light”. The implications of this are making me feel rather moody. How broad is the patent anyway? Did anyone patent the mood ring when it came out? Prior art! Ironically, if the light’s blue, the vacuum cleaner is happy. Hmm.

I’ve been continuing to ruminate the marketing paradigm shifts that need to occur as products go completely digital. Will consumers still go to Tower Records to browse for albums when they can be downloaded online? Will music stores disappear faster than bookstores? You don’t really experience the physical nature of a CD. It just disappears into the player. If marketing folks want to keep us coming to stores and shelling out cash for physical items, I’m sure they will devise clever ways to continue to use up petroleum and trees. But it will be entirely more convenient to download music off the ‘net. I’m just not sure how I would package that up to give to someone else as a present. Will someone invent digital giftwrap? What would that be? And what about album cover art? Perhaps the music player of the future will have a screen to show artwork instead of just text to identify the song and artist. John Perry Barlow’s article “Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net” has some relevant thoughts on this topic. If you don’t want to slog through the entire article, go to his conclusions at the bottom, the last of which is: “in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.” And, not surprisingly, he has a lot to say about the inadequacy of current intellectual property law. Many thanks to Dru for sending me the Barlow links.

A couple of funny items in this site of newspaper corrections. My favorite: “A caption in Monday’s Chronicle incorrectly stated that a typical hyena consumes more meat than any other carnivore. Taken as an entire species, spotted hyenas are thought to consume more meat than any other species. But other carnivores individually consume more than a hyena.” Hmmm…did they add up all the kitty cats in the world?

I got this from Robot Wisdom, and I abhor logging “been there done that” links, but I need to wave this under the nose of everyone who thinks I’m delusional when I talk about it. Yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars TV Christmas special. Even more frightening than that, Bea Arthur was in it.

My latest (non-programming) hack: Ralph the Elf Finds a Job. This was a lot of fun to do. The HTML is bare bones, the graphics a bit hefty, but we got it “shipped” quickly. I live for hacks like this. If it weren’t for insanity, I’d have gone insane a long time ago.

Can you relate to this passage from Ellen Ullman’s book? I’m not there yet, but there are many days that I wonder if I should stop before I reach that point. Then again, maybe I should stick it out so I can say grumpy old geek things like “in my day, we had to worry about things like disk space and Internet bandwidth!” (Thanks for the link, Landon.)

One day, the awe inspiring special effects from movies like The Matrix are going to look as crappy to people as earlier sci-fi movies do to us now.

I really want a “developer’s edition” of the major browsers. When I’m debugging web applications, I am forever clearing caches, quitting and restarting the browser, reloading frames, etc. I’d like complete control over the caching, especially how fiercely it holds onto Java applets (those take a restart to clear). I’d like to be able to set it to *never cache anything*… not just set my cache spaces to 0 and hope. I want better ways to hook in Java applet debuggers. I want built in JavaScript debugging. I want some kind of safe mode so I’m not as likely to crash the browser. Am I asking too much? Make it easier for us to develop and we’ll make more apps for your browser. (I know someone’s going to tell me to stop whining and just contribute to the mozilla project.)