Half-Baked Light

What to expect from today's agents and editors

2006-04-12T12:17:00.000-05:00

The Columbia Journalism Review covers much more than the state of the printed word in magazines and papers, or what takes up broadcast time and Web space in news outlets. The CJR has published articles as wide-ranging as an essay on the trials of editing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to a sobering look at the heavy lifting during the months after your book is accepted.

The Writer's League of Texas has its Agents and Editors Conference coming up, a meeting where my writing group practice, The Writer's Workshop, will have an exhibitor's table in the Capitol View Terrace at the Capitol Marriott Hotel. To set expectations correctly about winning an agent or editor's attention, I offer this pointer.

A CJR article titled The Education of Stacy Sullivan chronicles the struggle of this first-time fiction author, a reporter for The New York Times who turned her Kosovo war dispatches into a non-fiction book. (80 percent of all books published are non-fiction titles, by the way, accounting for the four-fold increase in published titles just since 1991.) Sullivan signed with an agent who'd read an article she'd written for Mirabella. Esmond Harmsworth got her a book contract with St. Martin's Press, a press that often takes a flyer on small books from first-time book writers.

As that Agents and Editors conference comes closer on my calendar here in Austin, I read the CJR's advice on agents closely:

These days, agents set the bar for entering the world of publishing. There was a time when getting an agent was the easy part, when even without a polished proposal, an agent might be willing to take a risk on a writer who showed promise and to develop an idea with the writer. And although agents such as these might still exist, they, like editors who actually mold a text, are becoming exceedingly rare.

This makes sense. If it is harder to find a publishing house to acquire a serious book, then agents, who depend for their livelihood on selling books to these houses, should be more reluctant to spend their time on tomes that may never find their place next to a Frappuccino at a Barnes & Noble café. Harmsworth is not alone when he says, “I don’t take on a writer unless we know exactly where the idea is going."

Agents are hired to look out for the business aspects of the writing craft. It's reasonable to expect them to focus on what will sell, and how to package it for a publisher's tastes. The surprise to Sullivan was how little St. Martin's was able to do to help her book become better.

At a celebratory deal-signing lunch, Sullivan told her editor that she was hungry for a lot of editing. The editor said she hoped this would be the first of many lunches. As it turned out, throughout the next three years, Sullivan would see her editor only once more (by chance, as she stopped by St. Martin’s to drop off some photographs). For a book like Sullivan’s, not a high-priority acquisition, this was not unusual. What it meant, though, was that she was about to enter the solitary cave of book writing without so much as a pocket flashlight.

In this, St. Martin's is hardly alone: Much like the movie business, books have a different life in the hands of independent and university press publishers. Those "producers" have less marketing clout, shorter runs, and less compensation for authors than the "studios" of major presses. But it seems these indie writers won't get left in the dark with their editing, either. The CJR article says that "there is nonetheless an overwhelming trend in publishing of editors who don’t really edit. And for the most part this is a function of the increasingly market-driven aspect of the business."

That's something to think about when an agent steers a project toward more money from a bigger publisher, one keen for massive markets. Which might be a good reason to skip the agents who only want to do the big deals — unless you really like being left alone to do your work.

Windows wishing, aided by virus vendors

2006-03-01T13:31:00.000-06:00

When your publishing platform gets pushed around in the press, unfairly, you might begin to see the mainstream prejudice against thinking different. Macs have far fewer virus problems than PCs running Windows. But it only takes one exploit to pull the Mac down to the Windows security level, apparently.

Despire dire stories in the press — especially in places like India and Australia, far from the North American media markets — nobody has any evidence of a security breach like Windows users suffer. Not yet. But the bone-headed mainstream press, as well as the Windows users already battered by exploits, equate these new leaks to water pouring across a spillway.

Typical is a brainless headline like "First virus seen targeting Apple computers." Wrong; not the first virus, just the first serious security hole in years. It also needs a specific browser, set to a default state that Apple needs to fix. You can fix it as a Mac user with two clicks. But it is an exploit, now further exposed by security vendors.

Meanwhile, those security vendors, bless 'em, have their sights set on a new market, relatively untapped: Mac users. We've secured our terminals here, logged away from our admin accounts. But our vendor Intego has posted an update, too.

So where's the stories of millions of desktops infected or vandalized by a virus? Oh yeah — over in the Windows marketplace. You'd think the level of dread over there would be enough to float the virus vendors' boats. But we continue to be warned, not by folks who have no-cost solutions, but by the companies who stand to profit from our need to secure our publishing platforms.

An e-mail tax to publish, or "You've got [paid] mail!"

2006-02-22T15:21:00.000-06:00

America Online, gateway and de-facto publisher for so many people who go online, will now be taking money to pass its members their mail. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the AOL plan to let bulk mailers pay to have their messages delivered straight to a preferred in-box of an AOL customer.

Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasingly difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

Non-profits like The Association for Cancer Online Resources are steamed about this, too, because they publish their messages by way of e-mail. Heck, a lot of us do, trying to build a practice or get notice for our publications. The belief now is that un-paid e-mails to AOL customers are going to get rough treatment, like a streetwalker pretending that what you're about to embark on is "a date." Unpaid messages are mail, alright. Just not the kind you'd take home to meet mom.

MoveOn.org is mounting an e-mail campaign (some irony there) to make AOL change its mind. It's referencing reports in The New York Times (which in another bit of irony, was among the publishers testing the GoodMail service that will make the AOL scheme possible) and from L-Soft, which makes the Listserv software that drives so many public interest newsgroups.

Good Morning's bright humor

2006-02-21T13:07:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite moments each morning is scanning the headlines from Good Morning Silicon Valley. John Paczkowski pens this wicked, arch look at the top companies' tech news each workday, with plenty of humor embedded. Much of it appears in the headlines for each of the four or five items in the e-mail/blog. For example, a story about Google's ploy to enter the search engine derby in China — by way of censoring searches on things like "democracy" — got this headline: It's like watching little Anakin grow up to be Darth Vader. So much for not being evil, Google.

There's so much hubris, posturing and vapor-work going on in the computer biz. GMSV, run by The San Jose Mercury News (known as the Merc out in the Valley), is a great deflator. You can browse the the high tech lampooning at the GMSV blog, along with real reporting, as well as sign up to get a reminder e-mail in your box each workday. Even if you subscribe to a boatload of e-mail newsletters like I do, this will be the funniest one you read about compters.

One wonderful bonus of each GMSV e-mail: A link to something offsite, but just as funny. For example, Google's grab at the Chinese market, as well as the rolling over by Yahoo and others, is the subject of this Flash cartoon — an ad for iRepress.

When myspace becomes his space

2006-02-20T18:21:00.000-06:00

News from the world of the Web, where more than 50 million people belong to social community myspace.com: Be prepared to see even more of your online neighbors. Perhaps one of them will have a staple through her navel.

Playboy has announced that it is searching for females who are myspace.com denizens to appear in an upcoming "Women of myspace" pictorial. Playboy has done this thing often enough before that its editor can compare response in this search to prior "Women of" pictorials. A story in MediaPost tells about the latest success at finding models, presumably of legal age.

"This ranks up there with the best searches we've done," said Editor John Thomas. "We'll probably shoot more than we usually do. We've been overwhelmed with the number and quality of submissions that we've gotten." He estimated that the site could have up to 30 different young women in the feature.

Face it, people want to be noticed and get connected. That's a primary attraction for myspace, although MediaPost notes a story about a 14 year old in New Jersey who was allegedly murdered by a man in his 20s she'd met through myspace.com.

That dangerous outcome would probably make myspace no different, really, than McDonalds, the Big 12 Conference, Baylor University — all places where murder has taken place. Oh, and all subjects of previous Playboy "Women of" pictorials.

It's not that much of a challenge to find posing in myspace, anyway.

With 50 million members, though, some of it is bound to be unclothed. What's attracting Playboy is the same thing luring any other media baron: A link to the glorious 14-34 demographic, the heartland of places like myspace.

Of course, these pictures won't be of any hard-bodied men on myspace. This has the writers on Feministing not exactly outraged, but wondering if they could be co-opted by Playboy in the future on an unauthorized pictorial. Myspace, while taking Playboy ads, isn't exactly cooperating with the magazine on the project.

Wired tells us in a recent issue that hard-core Web addicts call the outside world, where people live, "the meatspace." Playboy's going to do its best to blur that distinction a little more with its pictorial.

Update, Feb. 22

News Corp., makers of your friendly Fox News network, said in a Wall Street Journal article that it's trying to protect myspace users. But hey, who knows about safety better than Fox News, the network usually trying to scare the bejesus out of us?

From the Journal:

[Myspace] also is considering limiting access to certain groups, such as "swingers," to those over 18; blocking search terms that predators could use to locate kids; and encouraging users between 14 and 16 to make their profiles "private," meaning they can only be viewed by people they already know.

"We're going to take some pretty dramatic steps to provide industry-leading safety," says Ross Levinsohn, president of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit, which includes MySpace.

It is a delicate operation for News Corp. because the media group wants to retain MySpace's cool factor.

Sony wants to open up a book reader empire

2006-02-18T14:47:00.000-06:00

After being beaten to the starting pole by Apple's iPod phenomenon, Sony will take a stab at another consumer media market this spring. The electronics giant that gave us the Walkman — remember Walkmans, those portable radio and tape-playing marvels of the 90s? — will serve up the Sony Reader. This gadget that will sell for about $50 less than the biggest iPod ($349), carries about 160 books, turns 7,500 pages on a single battery charge, and lets readers shop online in the new Sony Connect store for bestsellers and other titles.

It's those other titles that most interest me, since Sony seems to be hinting about making its Connect store a place where a writer might publish a novel or non-fiction book. The prices in its teasing screen-shot (the store's not open yet) show a $19.95 cost for Freakanomics. That's more than $6 higher than the cost at Amazon.com for a digital copy of the book that you read in Acrobat on any computer. Sony will have some work to do in order to get competitive on content. It was the content rights management that killed off the company's chance at catching Apple's wave it began with the iPod tsunami. You could download music from Sony, but good luck at sharing it. It was in a peculiar format, too, and the only way to play your music at first was to convert it to Sony's.

I don't know if Sony's figured out that last roadblock. Fine print on the Sony site says you can read PDF Acrobat files on the Reader, but only if you convert them to the BBeBook format. Same for blogs and newsreader content. Heck, most people don't even know how to use a newsreader, let alone convert its content.

You can't fault the hardware that Sony has built in its efforts. The Reader is lightweight, stylish and small enough to be treated like a paperback. It's got MP3 playing capabilities, so long as your music isn't protected like the tunes you buy at the iTunes music store. Sony is making a big deal of its new screen technology, which is supposed to make reading a digital screen just as comfortable as reading a book.

In the end, it's how many songs or stories or movies you can download that will lift up a new idea like the Sony Reader. If Sony would see the vast collection of under-published novels and books as its new heartland of content, it could offer something not well served already by Amazon and standard PCs. Of course, you'd have to be able to buy these cutting-edge, noveau novels at a fraction of the bestsellers' costs. That won't matter to the writers. We should still make our $3 a book in royalties on this deal, since the "publisher" won't have to buy ink, paper or ship cardboard cartons of our books to the booksellers.

Spreading the word on low-fat's failure

2006-02-08T11:26:00.000-06:00

There's manna for the media today. News this morning about the failure of low-fat diets to improve health over a 10-year study of postmenopausal women is like a good hurricane: something everybody can understand and have feelings about. So many of us, my house included, have been working hard to get used to the taste of less fat in our food. After the food companies reeled us in with LOW FAT on the labels, they grabbed us all again in the last two years with LOW CARB. By now, 2 percent milk seems like a splurge in my fridge.

That's going to come undone in some households this week. Spend a few minutes with Google News by typing in Dr. Jules Hirsch, author of the National Institute for Health study — then look at all the spins the media is putting on 10 years of research. The comments range from, "This was bogus advice to begin with" to "Well, yes, the study showed no measureable benefit from eating less fat. But you shouldn't go nuts now."

Trouble is, a 10-year study is massive in medical research. Hardly any run that long. Some media outlets have found doctors who say, "well, they should have run the study longer to get results." Theories die hard.

I'd bet the freezers will be bare of Haagen Daz by the end of the week. Out on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, the readers are already weighing in, so to speak, on being released from their fatless prisons. A typical letter, from Violet Lawton of Alameda:

I have been on a low-fat diet for about 30 years. Four years ago I had a heart attack. A year later, I had lung cancer and a pneumonectomy, so I believe the results of the National Institutes of Health study from bitter experience. It makes me mad that I could have had hot fudge sundaes all these years.

What's clear is that there's no silver bullet to health, despite what the food companies would promote on their packages. You gotta move, you gotta eat smart. A San Jose Mercury News story includes a quote from a Stanford researcher who says, "What we need to be thinking about is a healthy low-fat diet. We really need to hone in on getting nutritious foods into our diets.''

Of course, the coverage was so hurried at the Merc that the quote has a typo: "we really need to home in on..." And perhaps we do need to focus on the home, for those of us who are trying to eat more controlled meals.

Expect lots of coverage of the 49,000-woman study, poured like caramel over Natural Vanilla Bean Blue Bell. If there's some extra intelligence that surfaces, like adding exercise — well, maybe that's the jimmies over the top of this confection of liberation.

Breaking work's chain of command

2006-02-07T07:58:00.000-06:00

I subscribe to military.com, a weekly e-mail report distributed by the job resource monster.com and dedicated to the opportunities for US veterans. (I'm a vet from the '70s, post-Vietnam, but I feel some kinship with today's more combat-tested troops My unit, 1st Cavalry, 7th Battalion, only faced the threat of combat with a superpower while out on the Iron Curtain.)

This week's report includes a brief story about joblessness among returning Iraq veterans. This is a story as old as military service; troops who return from combat have often struggled to find a job. For all the sticker-patriotism that cruises on the back of SUVs I've seen, employers still aren't making their contribution to the war they say they support. Vets 20-24 face a jobless rate twice as high as non-vets in the same age group.

Military.com got purchased by Monster in 2004, after starting its life as Military Advantage. It's got 6 million members and markets to them via a weekly e-mail that includes links to stories like the one above. There's media venture capital in there, too. The About page says that "Military.com has raised over $30 million from leading venture investors and strategic partners, including A&E Television Networks." The top management team is all veterans, with the exception of one senior marketing VP, a Harvard MBA who created the Nabisco Web site Nabisco Direct.

The Web site isn't overrun with ads. It's got a low-key, here's-the-facts feel, a rare thing in a medium that markets to such a large group. It's free to join. I always include my military service on my resume, dated as that experience is, but I can't recall ever being asked about it in an interview. Military.com has a middle of the road editorial slant. It's been critical of the way the Iraq war has been run, commenting on strategies that simply chew up the troops without a clear plan. In that regard, it has kinship with more left-leaning Web media like the Salon.com.

Last week Salon ran an article that "investigated" the high use of waivers to get those kids into am Army being sent to Iraq. Waivers are used, just like they were in my '70s Army, to admit people with criminal offenses, both minor and otherwise. That's not a new story, either Â but that's because military service can be a poor career move: Low pay, great danger, and then not enough help when you return from public service.

Support the war, or don't Â but give a veteran a job chance and repay what you owe as a citizen.

Taking business coverage topless

2006-02-04T07:46:00.000-06:00

You need to drive investors to your news sources any way you can, even if it means chatter about taking your top off. In one of the genuine lowbrow moments in financial journalism history, Forbes has put up a video report on its Web site on "The Best Topless Beaches" in the world. They had the common sense to have a couple of young women reporting on this compelling financial news, rather than leering brokers nudging one another in expensive, expansive suits. Swimsuits are business, too.

You might be able track down this legendary coverage at the Forbes site's video barn. Don't worry — the report's video is strictly G-rated.

Technology opens classroom doors for free

2006-02-03T07:20:00.000-06:00

Something special has come online from Stanford University, the college closest to Apple's world HQ. The two institutions have teamed up to offer 500 lectures and speeches for free though Apple's iTunes software. Stanford seems to get a lift by showing the world what its educational clout is based upon. Apple, of course, gets another 500 reasons to encourage people to download and use the software which drives millions of dollars a day into its music coffers.

The content is diverse. The front page of the Stanford iTunes site — think of it as an album cover for the university — includes two icons' speeches, from the Dalai Lama and Steve Jobs. Jobs had a commencement address videotaped last summer at Stanford, a remarkable 15 minutes of admissions and inspiration that revolves around Jobs being adopted, cashiered out of Apple in the '80s, and getting a usually-terminal cancer prognosis.

As for the Dalai Lama, well, there's more than five hours of him talking about meditation, non-violence, craving, suffering and choice. Topics that an exile from his native country has been eloquent about for several decades by now. There's also "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" a speech by faculty member Robert Sapolsky about infectious diseases and how Western disease has become a slow death for many of us. Stress kills.

It's all free. Follow the Stanford link at itunes.stanford.edu to get your seat in the lecture hall. Even while Apple has been reselling PBS "Austin City Limits" content in the iTunes store — taking a public broadcasting resource and making "viewers like you" pay twice for it — the company is also reaching out to make some private university resources available to the public.

A less-well-known resource for online lectures has been emerging from New Mexico, well in advance of the Stanford-iTunes collaboration. At the software company AICS Research, a series of public lectures is available for viewing and listening. Wirt Atmar, the founder of the company and a scientist, professor and software developer, has created QCShow, a free player and for-sale authoring suite that captures slides along with synchronized audio to distribute lectures and talks. For the moment, QCShow only operates with Windows. Atmar gave me a demonstration of the technology several years ago at an HP computer conference. Since then he's gotten a National Science Foundation grant to continue QC Show development and content creation.

The Oscars pimp up some talent

2006-02-01T06:49:00.000-06:00

This will be the first year the word "pimp" appears on a list of nominees at the Oscars. Yesterday's announcement of the 2005 nominated songs list included the jumping track from Hustle and Flow, "It's Hard for a Pimp." (Great song, by the way, if you have any interest in hip-hop or rap. One of the characters in the film is played by DJ Qualls, who's got a speech where he talks about rap returning to its roots, in the South, and that all good rap is really based on the blues.)

As for the Oscars, I'd kept hearing about Hustle and Flow; it made the 10 Best List in Rolling Stone, and the movie includes a performance by Terrence Howard which drew praise from lots of critics. Howard's had a hell of a year, with broad range from the slick TV producer in Crash who goes along to get along, all the way to the striving, seedy DJay in Hustle and Flow, where he got his Best Actor nomination. Howard's the only actor of color to be nominated this year in any category, so we rented Hustle and Flow last night, since the movie fell into the sweet spot of earning a nomination but already being out on DVD.

The Oscars are a celebration in my house, beating close to the heart of passion for the movies that Abby brought to my life. I always loved movies; I had a subscription to the American Film Institute's magazine in the 70s, well before I met my bride. But in our life together here, movies rule the nights, even though we live in The Live Music Capital of the World (TM, Austin Chamber of Commerce). A band is a band, and you can dance to it. But a movie is a story.

For the last 16 years, the morning of the nominations brought a little joy before sunup. Out in California they announce the nominated films and artists at 5:30, so the list rolls out into the press before 8 Texas time. In the early 90s I'd go log onto Compuserve — remember Compuserve? — and grab the Associated Press story, feeling like the old wire editor I was back on The Daily Texan. Today, there's Google News (just out of beta, I hear), which had 944 stories on the nominations by 1 PM. Lots of those were that AP story, run in hundreds of papers big and small all over the world. But there was also plenty of good analysis by lunchtime in California. (Time's Richard Corliss had a funny, insightful roundup, as did Ebert, a couple of the older pros ready to romp early on with the news.)

As for Hustle and Flow, I'd give it a thumbs-up. I agree with Ebert: it's the rare movie about how art can make a life worth living, especially one that's been without redemption for a long time, like a pimp's. We love this kind of story. One of the most powerful such moments I've seen in a film lies in Pleasantville, when Jeff Daniels, the soda jerk who never knew about color in art, gets inspired by Tobey Maguire, who shows him an art book with famous paintings. Daniels responds by unleashing his art overnight onto the windows of the soda shop, backed by a rousing anthem from Randy Newman.

And so with the nominations ends the "For Your Consideration" season. This year Abby had some extra frequent flyer miles ready to expire, so she put them into subscriptions to The Hollywood Reporter and weekly Variety. Wow, the money spent on full-page ads announcing a movie "for your consideration" to spark a nomination. My favorite was the cover ad (the Reporter sells ads on its cover) with a picture of Darth Vader's helmet. Open the magazine, and you'd hear the sound of Vader's respirator, coming from a miniature player glued inside the page.

You could argue that it worked, too: Star Wars' final saga did earn a nomination for Makeup. The movie's only nod, though. It was shut out of Visual Effects, this year's domain of the Monkey Movie that Couldn't, (only four Kong nominations, all craft, most notable Art Direction), War of the Worlds and The Chronicles of Narnia. (The last movie in the list brings me full circle to rap; check out the SNL parody of a rap on the Chronic-als of Narnia at You Tube.)

They need our support

2006-01-31T10:05:00.000-06:00

When the women we love take chances to change their lives, they need our support. It can mean more than anything we bring back from the jewelery store.

Eva Longoria got her support from main squeeze Tony Parker on Sunday night. Longoria thought Parker was flying to Salt Lake City with his San Antonio Spurs teammates for Monday night's game. He surprised her by showing up in Los Angeles. She and the rest of the "Desperate Housewives" cast were honored in LA at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series.

Parker flew back to Salt Lake City late Sunday night after the awards show. In the San Antonio paper, he knew he did the right thing.

"I could buy any gift for her and it would never compare to what happened yesterday," Parker said. "She cried and was so happy I was there to support her."

That support means so much. Abby's on her public journey for her Heartfelt Yoga practice this month, getting publicity in articles about her HeavyWeight Yoga classes. She came to me today and said she needed my support. She'll be famous, and I'll be our point guard. What a team.

Don't tell me it's not true; call it fiction

2006-01-28T01:27:00.000-06:00

After gracing the cover of Poets & Writers magazine this summer, James Frey got cashiered out of the nonfiction vanguard by Oprah Winfrey yesterday. Miz O had defended Frey when a blog accused the author of making up parts of his memoir. Turns out it was true that he was being false.

P&W called him "a kinder and gentler James Frey" in the mag's coverline. In the article, he says "I don't particularly care if I'm part of the publishing culture or not." Good thing, James.

Oprah said she felt duped. She dressed down Frey's publisher Doubleday on her show, after Oprah's producers had asked the company if they'd checked on the truth in Frey's "A Million Little Pieces." They said they had, but they hadn't. Apparently that might've gotten in the way of 2 million copies sold.

Frey is a long way from innocent in all this, but said he did submit the book to the editors at his publisher first as a work of fiction. It returned as a memoir. Everything is fiction, really, just our versions of what happened.

But the truth in publishing is that eight books out of 10 printed today are non-fiction. Saying that a story is true seems to get the presses rolling when a well-written tale that's elegantly made up cannot. Now there's lifetime employment for legions of fact-checkers in the offing, according to Mediabistro.com's Galley Cat columnist. The change might slow down the freelance editor business, though:

It's probably impossible to fact-check absolutely everything. One issue that might have contributed to this so-called erosion is the rise in outsourced editing, especially copyediting. Because by saving costs, sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

In my writing group practice, The Writer's Workshop, I follow the tenet of the Amherst Writers and Artists training: We treat everything written in our group as fiction, unless the writer says otherwise. It might be a good practice for Doubleday, too.

Misfire from an elected gun-toter

2006-01-27T05:46:00.000-06:00

In Virginia, a 16-year member of the legislature shot a bullet into his own bulletproof vest this week at the state capitol. Jack Reid apologized to his fellow lawmakers in Richmond after his .380 handgun went off in his office.

In Virginia, Reid needs a concealed carry permit to bring a gun into the legislature. Here in our state capital, legislators also need a concealed carry permit, available for $140. The license entered our lawbooks when then-Gov. George W. Bush signed it in 1995. The Texas Rifle Association celebrated the five-year anniversary of the law by taking note of a survey of the law's effect on Texas crime:

[Engineer Bill] Sturdevant compared the arrest records of concealed handgun license holders with the arrest records of the general population. [His 43-page report] found that Texans without concealed handgun licenses are eight times more likely to be arrested for crimes of violence than license holders.

Bill carries a handgun, just like the author of the Web page article on the anniversary. Apparently, if you can cock a hammer, every problem looks like a nail in the coffin of crime.

Apple's got less iPod juice than users want

2006-01-20T22:29:00.000-06:00

At last week's MacWorld, Steve Jobs announced with pride that Apple sold 32 million iPods in 2005. "And it still wasn't enough," he said, noting the company will be making more for those of you who couldn't get one in time for the holiday.

What's really not enough is what's included with those $6 billion worth of music players. Most iPods don't come with a charger. You need to plug it into your computer to charge the device, or fork over an extra $29 for a two-inch-square white brick that plugs into a wall. iPod users are livid over this, especially those who used to get a charger, a dock and a carrying case with their older 20GB iPods. True, those iPods didn't show photos, or play movies, or present all the details from the album that's playing in full color. But at least you could charge them without a computer.

The word "shame" is on the lips of lots of iPod customers writing reviews on the Apple site who discover this after they've spent the $300-$400 on their players.

Oregon sheds the Schiavo Effect

2006-01-18T05:51:00.000-06:00

The only state in the US where assisted suicide is legal can breathe easier about taking a dignified last breath. The US Supreme Court has struck down the Justice Department effort to kill an Oregon law that lets terminal patients ask doctors for lethal drugs.

From the New York Times:

"Since 1998, when the law was enacted, through 2004, a total of 208 people have taken their lives by lethal injection with a physician-prescribed drug, usually a barbiturate. Critics had said Oregon would become a suicide center, with people flying in to end their lives. They also predicted that the law would be unfairly used against uneducated people or those without health insurance or adequate medical choices. In the seven full years since the law has been in effect and records have been kept, more than 60 percent of those who have killed themselves have had some college education, the state reported."

Smarter people know better than to leave a legacy of debt to their heirs and family when the end is evident.

The Rich Irony of Being a Loser

2006-01-16T07:27:00.000-06:00

Being a loser: something to avoid. That's what Maxtor reminded us Macworld attendees about in San Francisco. The company campaigned to get us to buy its One Touch backup system, something easy enough that you might really use it. Because backup is that dirty little task we all ought to do more often, like flossing or walking the dog.

In SF, Maxtor started out with giveaways. As soon as we walked out of the Steve Jobs keynote speech, a fellow on Howard Street was passing out black gloves. In packages of three. "Because we know you'll lose one." The theme went on in the show hall, where free t-shirts carried the slogan "I'm a loser." The bookmarks they passed out bore pictures of glum-looking fellows. "I'm a loser," they all began, then explained "I lost all my best party mixes," or "I lost my girlfriend's best pictures."

While we walked the Streets of San Francisco, we saw posters slapped onto construction site plywood, directing us to loserloserloser.com. Yeah, it's pretend blog run by Maxtor with articles on what to do if you lose data. Kind of a "Stewart Smalley" for the computer set.

The irony, you might wonder? Well, you backup because every disk drive fails, at some point. You're only supposed to use a disk drive to back up if you have plenty of them. They won't all fail at once, will they? The computer pros I write about for The 3000 Newswire use tape to backup, or CD media — something besides more disk drives.

And apparently, you can lose data off a OneTouch II, the very device that Maxtor would have you buy to protect your data. Have a look at this user interview on CNET (note that the editors gave the product an 8 out of 10 rating. Apparently didn't have one crash up on them in Windows.

Living the good iLife by the Bay

2006-01-12T06:47:00.000-06:00

I am enjoying MacWorld San Francisco this week for the first time in my computing life (or my iLife, as I guess Steve Jobs would describe it). I spend significant time in my Texas life experimenting, testing and toying with Mac software. I've been a Mac user since 1987, a relationship longer than anything except being a parent and a writer. (I married my lovely bride Abby a few years later, so it's pretty darn close there, but the Mac did appear first. Sometimes Abby must feel like she's got a rival when I disappear into my study to study the Mac. She's a Mac user herself, which has got to help her patience with this passion of mine.)

But I'm not in that study this week. It's been a thrill for a few days to have it all a few steps away instead of on the Internet. I had one experience yesterday on the show floor that paid for the whole trip — because I couldn't have gotten it anywhere else in the world, and I needed it this month.

(If you're a Mac addict or just admire the Mac from afar, you should read the show roundup at Macintouch by Henry Norr. He's been a Mac reporter about as long as I've been covering the computer business — the middle '80s — and his article has got just the right mix of wonder and dismay in his article, shaped by his analysis.)

As for me, I blog quite a bit to practice journalism these days, a lot of it for The 3000 NewsWire and some of it out here using Blogger. But I'm launching my writing workshop practice this year, and I want The Writer's Workshop to have its own The Write Stuff blog. Nothing could be better for branding than to have that blog up at The Writer's Workshop site. But getting that to happen looked like I'd need to install complex software (Moveable Type), then wrestle to configure it. Not my strong suit, but I could force it with enough trial and error. Plenty of time to do that, all keeping me from writing.

Enter iLife '06, the most significant part of this Macworld's announcements for me and my writing career. The iLife software now includes iWeb, Apple's first page layout program and one that includes automated blog-building ability. These days you can create beautiful blogs with very hard software, or ugly blogs with very easy software. Yes, Steve Jobs blew his usual share of smoke at us during his keynote on Tuesday. (Apple even had Intel's CEO enter the stage from a haze of dry ice fog, as if he'd just left a chip clean room. You can see a Webcast of the keynote at the Apple site.) But away from the smoke, iWeb really looks like it can give us Web page cutters beautiful and easy together. How do I know? On the Apple show floor, one of the support team helped me build a test blog and put it up at my own site.

So I got my very own 20-minute primer on iWeb in the new iLife from a first-rate Apple staffer on the floor. We even built a test blog and hosted it on one of my sites (workshopwriter.com) using the tools Apple includes with every new Mac. (Well, almost; we had to download a decent third-party file transfer tool, because Apple’s built-in FTP didn’t want to let us write to my Web site.) The staffer (I suspect he’s in development or support, he was so good) said he's encountered the same FTP problem himself from time to time.

Plainly put, I couldn’t have gotten that kind of experience anyplace else in the world. Surely not even at a Genius Bar at an Apple store on anything except a really slow day. (I visited the Apple Store's mothership on Stockton last night; my appointment to solve a Mac sleep problem started 20 minutes late. They had a queue eight deep.) I believe that at least this month, nobody in Austin's Apple Store would know iWeb as well as Apple’s own staff here in the Bay Area. Especially so early in the product’s life. How early was it? I told a couple of the Apple kids at the Apple booth that I'd just bought iLife, and it was so new they wanted to see the packaging for it. I pulled it out of my backpack to show them. That’s how you can be sure you’re plenty early in the lifecycle of a product.

How much more fun could San Francisco be? Well, last night there was Lestat, the just-premiered musical with music and lyrics by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road's creators, doing a musical together for the first time), based on three Anne Rice Lestat novels. The book for the show — already scheduled for a Broadway opening later this spring — was written by the woman who wrote the screenplay for Beauty and the Beast, then the book for that movie's subsequent musical (already the sixth-longest running show in Broadway history). I was pumped, and bought a great sixth-row seat direct from the theatre's box office, a cast comp turned back. (That's a trick my Abby taught me in London the year we were married, combined with a tip my pal Birket Foster showed me in San Jose at a hockey game. Always ask them if there's any returns.)

But what I saw needed quite a bit of work. This is a tryout town for Broadway. Much like New Haven's Taft Theatre in the movie All About Eve, the Curran now sees its share of wrinkled newborns. Lestat is still pretty wrinkly, though it lifted me up a few times. More on that tomorrow. Even wrinkly, the experience was still worth the $85 ticket, to me.

I miss that bride of mine. But when I'm back home tomorrow, I'll have this week's sandbox Mac time tucked away as a wish fulfilled. To paraphrase my friend Kathy Jacobs O'Brian, the iLife is good out here on the Bay.

Yoga is big enough to hunt with

2005-12-22T07:51:00.000-06:00

Just when you think you understand the range of yoga, it can surprise you. I was pretty astonished this morning to learn that a Kripalu yoga instructor also enjoys a good turkey hunt in Tennessee. Sierra Bender is a teacher of Kripalu yoga, the same kind my wife Abby has been certified in. Abby leads Kripalu classes in studios here in Austin. Sierra is leading a week-long class up at Austin's health resort The Crossings called "Boot Camp for Goddesses." The note in The Crossings newsletter included a picture of Sierra striking a martial-arts kind of pose. It was different enough to make me look closer when I learned she's a Kripalu teacher, too. Kripalu is a unique path of yoga.

Little did I know that it can include turkey hunting. Just Google Sierra. Among the five links you will see: Tennessee's Wild Side, an Outdoor Adventure Show.

http://www.tnwildside.org/stories.asp?Story=281

Where Sierra, as the "good friend" of "80’s country music superstar" Gary Morris, joins her fellow hunter on a good turkey shoot.

Where to begin here?

1. Ah, basic cable, the kingmaker and publicity trough of the 21st Century.

2. The study of a 4,000-year-old practice can lead you to the conclusion that you can "enjoy hunting as part of making a connection with nature." Who knew.

3. Deer season will be well past when Sierra brings her goddesses out into the Texas Hill Country at the Crossings for hikes. Turkeys might want to bed down tight for the week in February, though.

4. Yoga is such a ancient vehicle that it's being driven in so many directions today. It's likely that Kripalu has got room for turkey hunters among its disciples. It's not Buddhism, after all. Yoga's shoulders are broad enough for both goddesses and friends of 80's country music superstars. It's an essential practice. Hardly a week goes by when I don't learn that yoga can be combined with nearly anything, from luxury cars to the right shootin' iron in the Tennessee woods. Your results may vary.

And I don't know if I'd want to get cross-wise with any of those goddesses in boot camp during that week in February.

Am I reading this correct? I'm in the Write City

2005-12-05T16:56:00.000-06:00

Today a score of cities have something fresh to crow about, including the one I live in. Austin ranked number 16 in the Connecticut State University survey of most literate US cities, far above other Texas cities and ahead of New York, Philadelphia, Toledo and Las Vegas.

While those last two might not be expected to rank high among literate towns, one is my childhood home and the other is the spot where my mom and brother have settled. According to statistics on libraries, Internet access, bookstores, newspapers and publishers, Austin stands just behind St. Louis, just ahead of Nashville. Seattle was number 1, nudging out Minneapolis on the basis of Internet access.

What drew my hometown so high on the rankings was also its Internet access. Austin is the third-best connected city in America, ranked by access points, library connections and online book sales. Last year Internet wasn't a part of the survey calculations, and Austin was ranked 22. Considering that I'm editing an online newsletter (3000newswire.com/blog) for the first this year, publishing a printed journal of more than 500 circulation, and starting up a local creative writing workshop practice, it feels like I'm in the Write City.

Toledo moved up from last year, and scored as high as it did because of its libraries according to the survey. I recall those libraries with great gratitude, from stately branches like the West Toledo location with its wide bay window seats to the philathropic palace in downtown, thick with the scent of cotton-rag paper and decorated with soaring murals in its atrium space. Wood chairs and floors and the hum of microfilm machines checking out books are a big part of my grade-school memories.

Reality bites; It could be over in a few moments

2005-11-28T14:23:00.000-06:00

In an incident worthy of "Six Feet Under," a elderly woman died of dog bites in a rural county not far from Austin.

On Saturday afternoon, Lillian Stiles was doing what she loved, tending her yard and flowers from atop her riding lawn mower. About 4:15 p.m., she would be found fatally mauled by a pack of dogs.

Stiles, 76, was found lying in her front yard at her home near Thorndale with bites all over her body. She had been attacked by six pit bull-Rottweiler mixed-breed dogs owned by a man living less than 500 yards away.

Just like that, while her husband of more than 50 years watched the Oklahoma game in the house, Lillian was gone. "I'm going out to mow," she might have said. She often did this while he watched football. She loved tending to her yard, according to the extraordinary report in the American Statesman:

http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/11/28dogs.html

We have so little prepared in our hearts for death, at least compared to other cultures. Savor every minute, even the ones that seem less than attractive. Live for the present. It could all be past as quickly as a handful of dogs can climb over a three-foot chain-link fence.

Why read blogs, if editors don't read mail?

2005-11-20T16:01:00.000-06:00

It's a crowded blogosphere out there, so I am grateful for anybody who's reading more than I do — and willing to report it. An entry in the local newspaper's blog made me wonder about this contract we have as blog readers. At least it seems like a contract, when a paper pays editors and reporters to, well, report.

Last week the American Statesman ran such a blog entry from its "Digital Savant." By way of comedy, or maybe frustration, he posted an entry about "Yawn-Worthy Tech Words" that says his finger moves to the delete button when any of the following words appear in his in-box e-mail:

MMORPG
Tech-savvy
Proprietary
Security-enhanced
Solution
Wireless
Hotspot
Must-have technology
Functionality
iPod-compatible
Anything to do with awards for blogging
Mobile
Storage
Microsoft

Wow. Unless it was an attempt at comedy, some of those words are actually important — if you want to know something about a tech product's capabilities. As someone who said he was an iPod user, how can he decide if a new accessory is something that works with that device he joked was "surgically attached to my hand?" While looking for a new laptop, I wanted to know "how do you determine what you might buy if you're immediately deleting everything with "wireless" in it?"

My Mac's dictionary widget reports that the antonym of savant is 'ignoramus.' The approach of deleting as editing makes me wonder how an editor gets to savant status. The word savant, from the French, means literally ‘knowing (person).'

I sat across from an IDG tech editor at a media dinner last month who admitted he had his knowing radar turned way down. "Face it," he said. "If I have a chance to cover this release from IBM, and one from this tiny little company, which is going to be more important?" A quest for knowing is why we're reading blogs. I think it means the editors are supposed to be reading for us — at least before they're so quick to delete.

To his credit, Omar Gallaga replied right away:

They keep forgetting to add the "(Idiot)" to my "Digital Savant" title.

There really is a problem of volume, though. If you saw all the press releases that I see in a day (not including the ones directly related to my main job at ¡ahora sí!), you'd see that some sort of filtering has to take place or I'd spend 80 percent of time wading through e-mails that have little to no use to anything we'd likely cover.

My point in the post wasn't that deleting e-mails is better than reading them -- it was that subject lines tend to blur together and there are some words that pop up again and again, even when they have little relevance to what's actually in the press release. You don't know how many times I've received an e-mail with a subject line that says "Must-have technology!" only to open the message and see that it's for a Budweiser koozie or a subscription-based service for Internet porn.

Truly, we live in amazing times.

Not as broken as it seems

2005-09-26T11:26:00.000-05:00

The world is not as broken as it seems. That's a central belief of Buddhists, optomists and high-flying kite personalities the world over. Given a long enough timeframe, even the worst of problems seem more manageable.

Today the US Justice department chipped in some survey statistics to suggest personal safety is getting no worse — and is a lot better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. The government issued a press release titled "Violent crimes and property crimes remained at 30-year lows in 2004."

www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/cv04pr.htm

In addition to fewer crimes against property and person, the biggest crime, murder, also dropped. "Preliminary murder estimates for 2004 from the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports indicate the number of murders decreased 3.6 percent from 2003. This is about the same per capita rate as that of the mid-1960s."

Do you feel safer this year than five years ago? If not, you might want to check out how much news you're consuming. Over the weekend here in Texas we got the worst possible forecasts for our future from the TV. Millions homeless. 25 percent of US oil refineries offline around the Texas gulf. Gas to $7 a gallon. It drove millions onto the roads here. The local traffic control signs out on US 183 by our house yesterday read "Massive delays to Houston. Gas shortage."

The day before, the signs were directing people to storm shelter at the local McNeil High School gym. Now they were being warned to stay away from returning home. Too many were on the road at once. Our friend Michelle had her parents staying at her house here, refugees from New Orleans who had their house along Lake P. ruined. They evacuated from Houston, where they took shelter after Katrina. Predictions of doom were thick on the TV for days before Rita hit the Sabine Pass. The Whole Foods market near our house not only sold out of bottled water, but sold out of the massive plastic bottles to hold the filtered water sold by the gallon there. By Saturday, the HEB where Nick works was full of people returning cases of water. Yesterday Austin set a record high for the date, 108 degrees.

Some of those evacuees felt prudence in escaping, I suppose, but think of all those who avoided days on the road, dehydration, the expense of hotel rooms, emergency supplies. How broken could the weather be here in the Hill Country? A stray tornado is all this town has ever seen over the 27 hurricane seasons I've watched.

News can help, but you might want to tune out for awhile and see if you feel healthier. One of the practices in the Dr. Andrew Weill Eight Weeks to Optimum Health plan is a one-week news fast. As he says, "I want you to discover and make use of the fact that you have choice as to how much news you allow into your consciousness, especially if it disturbs your emotional and spiritual equilibrium."

George Will posted a great column not long ago for Newsweek on "nominal news." News organizations should be like doctors, he said. A doctor's oath begins with a pledge not to make a patient any sicker. News organizations should pledge not to subtract from public understanding, "but subtract they do."

A friend of mine passed along a message about the three tests for reporting information: Truth, Goodness or Usefulness. If news doesn't pass any of those three tests, then it's really just low-budget entertainment. I believe that thinking the world is broken is a poor substitute for genuine entertainment: stories presented as compelling fiction, rather than speculation about a future that hasn't arrived. We don't need to believe the world is broken to participate in its story.

Katrina: A Near Miss, a Missed Show

2005-08-30T06:28:00.000-05:00

Out of the way of Hurricane Katrina, I'm reading the news from the New Orleans paper this morning to see what chance survives for my Sept. 11 conference trip I planned to take to the city that lives below sea level. It appears, as daylight breaks over the Gulf Coast city where Abby and I honeymooned in another September 15 years ago, the chance of that trip is as sunk as the cars throughout New Orleans streets.

My earliest report on the storm, written for the 3000 NewsWire blog Monday morning, was hopeful, since the hurricane had then turned a little to the east of the city. But I was talking with the executive director of a computer user group who'd organized the first HP Technology Forum. She had to stay hopeful while the storm passed through the New Orleans area. The trouble was that the hurricane took eight hours to pass through.

Along the way, the winds and water from Lake Pontchartrain broke a key levee on Monday. The Times-Picayune had first-rate reporting on the breach:

"We were good until the canal busted," Sontag said. "First there was water on the street, then the sidewalk, then water in the house." Officials of the Army Corps of Engineers have contingencies for levee breaches such as the one that happened Monday, but it will take time and effort to get the heavy equipment into place to make the repair. Breach repair is part of the corps' planning for recovery from catastrophic storms, but nobody Monday was able to say how long it would take to plug the hole, or how much water would get through it before that happened.

In Lakeview, the scene was surreal. A woman yelled to reporters from a rooftop, asking them to call her father and tell him she was OK, although fleeing to the roof of a two-story home hardly seemed to qualify.

About 5 p.m., almost as if on cue, the battery power of all the house alarms in the neighborhood seemed to reach a critical level, and they all went off, making it sound as if the area was under an air-raid warning. Two men surviving on generator power in the Lake Terrace neighborhood near the Lake Pontchartrain levee still had a dry house, but they were watching the rising water in the yard nervously. They were planning to head out to retrieve a vast stash of beer, champagne and hard liquor they found washed onto the levee. As night fell, the sirens of house alarms finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs.

It seems the further away the storm gets from the city, the worse the reports become. That's because most of New Orleans lies below sea level, built behind levees. I've been to the city three times before, but only on the last trip, when we drove across from Austin instead of flew in, did I take any note of these massive, well, dikes, for lack of a better comparison. All along the road away from New Orleans, they towered above the rented T-bird we were driving. The sight of water high enough and fast enough to break down these hills around the lake is a perfect-storm-like picture of a catastrophe. People always say that weather invokes the greatest media mania, but it seems warranted today.

There's a part of me, the curious writer-reporter, that's thinking if the conference organizers get optimistic, I'll have an excuse to use my air ticket and hotel reservation (prepaid, no less) to have a look at a city under seige. But that's not really why I'm supposed to be going to New Orleans in hurricane season. It's about listening to HP, as I said in my podcast on the subject earlier this month. That, and watching another user group try to take the mantle from the bankrupt Interex group for HP customers.

Some people in the HP community are saying that this act of God is all HP deserves, somehow. The thinking is that HP's conference — scheduled one month after the Interex show that has been held every summer — killed off the user group. It might have; nearly all of the operating budget for the user group came out of the one annual show. But I wouldn't wish the death and destruction visited upon New Orleans just to see the score settled with HP's marketing officials who decided to get into the conference business for the first time this year in a much bigger way.

That said, HP is learning this week that the conference business can be pretty tough. This is a company working very hard to tighten down all of its spending right now. One manager told me the cost controls he's seeing this quarter are "unprecedented," and he's worked at HP for 20 years. The cost of rescheduling this conference certainly will make those controls harder. That's the thing about control: It's mostly an illusion, like security. We plan and visualize, but then life unfolds, breaks the levee, and then we get to find out what strong stuff we are made of.

A way to smile at the shuttle

2005-08-10T11:09:00.000-05:00

Now that it's down on the ground, we can safely chuckle at the jokes about the space shuttle mission that wrapped up a couple of landings late and at least one launch attempt short. Out at the Andy Borowitz Web site, his shocker of today included this wrap-up "in other news" joke, the one-liner that's often funnier than the fake news story;

Elsewhere, NASA pronounced the just-completed space shuttle mission a success, saying that the Discovery astronauts had made important scientific discoveries about foam debris, missing tiles and weather delays.

It's easy to see that some of the rust is showing on the 25-year-old shuttle design. It's taken its toll on the sheen of the program, that devil-may-care swagger we expect since the days when Clark Gable wowed moviegoers in Test Pilot. The NY Times reported that the astronaut commander on Discovery didn't have much of a sense of humor about shifting the landing site yesterday:

Mission Control: "How do you feel about a beautiful, clear night with a breeze down the runway in the high desert of California?"

Commander Colonel Collins: "We are ready for whatever we need to do."

In years past, when I was a boy, the commander might have replied with a little quip in return. But when your last seven colleagues burned up on re-entry, the jokes come a little harder. NASA is already starting to trot out pictures of replacement designs for the shuttle; we sat in the briefing dome at the Kennedy Space Center on our trip last month and saw drawings that evoked the George Pal-style of spaceship, instead of a jet strapped on the back of the Saturn V.

But it's that Saturn V rocket that sat at the heart of my quest to see a launch in person. Smaller launch rockets go up on a regular schedule. The Atlas V is lifting an unmanned Mars explorer tomorrow, if NASA stays on schedule. If I read the musings of the rocket-heads right, the Atlas has less ability to rattle your chest when it rises off the pad, something pretty important to me. I will be further away from the pad when I see my first launch.

T-Minus another year

2005-07-26T07:39:00.000-05:00

In the next two hours NASA is going to try to shoot off Discovery into orbit. A couple of weeks ago I was just about this close to seeing the launch in person, standing on the steamy Florida space coast. But a fuel gauge got in the way of our experience, a gauge that apparently doesn't matter that much this morning. The map at left shows one of the less-close viewing sites, along the causeway, NASA offers for a $15 bus ticket. We were going to be even closer.

I talked with pride in the weeks before that July 13 launch attempt, pleased that I'd held onto the NASA launch transportation tickets I'd bought in January, 2003. My brother Bob and I were set to see a rocket launched in Florida, a brothers-only vacation with a tie back to our boyhoods, when we both grew up in thrall to astronauts and the Apollo moon missions. That was a different NASA, the kind that knew deadly risks were just a part of the job. All of its astronauts were military pilots, no strangers to danger. But almost as soon as I got my launch receipt in 2003, Columbia burned up on re-entry over the Texas skies, killing seven including several mission specialists. Bob and I toured the Kennedy Space Center anyway in early March, went to a few spring training games, and had a great time. I kept my tickets to see the launch "close up," knowing they'd try to return to flight eventually. I only hoped they wouldn't attempt in mid-summer.

Of course, as luck would have it the "Return to Flight" attempts unfolded exactly in the middle of a Florida summer. Abby and I took ourselves to the Space Coast two weeks ago after several rounds of rescheduling, moving our airline tickets and hotel reservations and rental cars from May 15 to May 22 and finally to July 13. Once NASA allowed the Delaware North Corporation, concessionaire that runs the Launch Transportation bussses, to send us fresh bus tickets and our all-important parking pass, Abby and I were good to go.

As it turned out, NASA was not. We got very close, at least in time. Distance to the launch pad was six miles from the open field in front of a lagoon out on Merritt Island, where the Kennedy Space Center fires off its rockets. Abby and I had made the bus trip to the viewing site — promised as the closest the public could get to the pad — and had laid out our blanket, opened our umbrella against the beastly mid-afternoon Florida sun, and put on our latest coat of sunscreen. The commentary on the loudspeakers had helped us figure out which of the many towers in the distance was the launch pad. A low peninsula about three miles out obscured the bottom of the pad, a disappointment since it would block the view of the rocket flames at their largest.

But that was not the biggest disappointment our day contained. A few moments later those loudspeakers announced the launch was scrubbed. We consoled ourselves with a free viewing of Space Station, narrated by Tom Cruise, back at the KSC Visitor Center, then plodded through return traffic back to our Titusville Ramada Inn room.

The trip was not a total loss. We enjoyed fabulous beach evenings, afternoons and a morning so stunning it will become a postcard we send to promote our new 3000 NewsWire blog. Yes, Cocoa Beach and the copious Florida fresh OJ squeezed alongside route A1A, sold from roadside stores like Policicchio Groves — that saved our mini-break vacation when NASA lost its nerve. The waiting at the KSC visitor center was not worth the distance to launch pad, as it turned out. We spent six hours at the center before our bus, one of more than 100 headed to three launch viewing sites, finally took us on our viewing attempt. I wouldn't recommend it unless you really enjoy sweaty crowds, $7 hamburgers and lines in front of porta-potties. There were superior launch briefings on the hour at the Shuttle Dome, completely SRO but with powerful air conditioning. We'd risen at 5 AM for the 4 PM launch, because NASA needed us to be at the security checkpoint by 9:30. I suppose somebody had to be on hand to buy those burgers and browse the gift shop. We didn't disappoint them on either count.

On the bus ride back from our scrubbing, a launch viewing veteran regaled us with his experiences and expert opinions. (No more night launches, he assured us, and the whole shuttle thing is due to wrap up in five years.) He lived in Orlando, a city 40 miles from the launch pad where he assured us everybody will be able to see what's set to launch this morning. So why was he riding the bus with us, having endured his own waiting game? He'd seen a dozen launches, though none recently. Hell, nobody had seen a recent launch, which probably explained the over-subscribed KSC facility and the no-empty-seats bus. The truth is that a launch is something you can see from all over the space coast. After our beachside delights, we decided that returning for another launch wouldn't involve the KSC. A blanket on the beach, with a cooler and decent umbrella and the constant kiss of the Atlantic shore breeze, seemed like the better place to view. Close is nice, sure. But once that rocket gets up into the air, the six miles versus 16 miles really doesn't matter as much.

Once they scrubbed so close to launch, we had to get honest and admit NASA really wasn't ready on July 13, or even a week later. The NASA channel, available on our hotel TV down in Cocoa Beach, put the attempt in perspective. After all, most of us have grown up with the phrase, "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we..." We take space travel for granted. The NASA administrator said in a press conference, "Sending humans into space is still at the very limits of technology here in the 21st Century."

Plainly put, this is rocket science. I hope NASA gets its flights returned today; the agency's head said yesterday that this flight is one of the three most important in the history of the 24-year-old shuttle program. (The other two were the very first, and the previous Return to Flight, after the Challenger exploded above the launch pad.) Like the signboards in front of restaurants and muffler stores all along the coast said during our five-day visit, "Godspeed Discovery." I'll be back, next time on the beach. And because I went, I'll know where to get the best Italian food I've ever had just down the road in Cocoa's outskirts, and where to wait on a launch that still represents the bravest thing we can do with technology.

Wandering the World of Wireless

2005-07-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

I'm posting this from the Austin Java Cafe, downtown branch, my first experience with public wireless networks. This sort of access used to be a revenue item for businesses, but now most places are offering it for free. It's the kind of sea change that seems to define our world these days: a business that looked like a lock for growth is just as likely to implode as explode in growth. Starbucks wants to charge you for this, as does Borders. Independent alternatives like this coffeehouse and Austin's great bookshop Bookpeople pitch it in for free. Go independents!

Free wireless access in public can be problematic, I hear from the experts at the computer journals. A story out on the Information Week blog reports that Wi-Fi at conferences and in hotels is pretty abysmal. I'm still pretty new at this stuff, so I don't have first-hand experience to share. But that blogger's picture of dozens of people sitting at a conference, laptops on laps while they "attend" a talk and try to log onto their e-mail systems, is not inspiring. I imagine that teaching anyplace where there's laptops allowed in the classroom also introduces this distraction.

Last night we saw a commercial from HP, advertising this very wireless ability for students now on the lookout for a cool laptop. Needless to say, the connection the TV promoted didn't involve reading professors' books on their screens. No, HP decided to promote the idea that their laptops were fast, so students could watch movies while they were in class.

There are times when staying focused is just the thing that is required. Seems like classrooms are a place for that, as well as on the road while visiting your Mom. I'm headed to Las Vegas in about a week to help my mom move to a new apartment, and since I've gotten this wireless card installed, I imagined a few Wi-Fi sessions while in Vegas to check on the rest of the world. Maybe not a good idea. Visiting mom as she bears down on 80 and changes her living space is at least as important as classroom time. Come to think of it, I guess they're both learning situations. I'm just glad I'll have my brothers and sister on hand to help with my lessons out there in the desert.

Paper Tigers in Publishing

2005-07-07T06:22:00.000-05:00

You hardly need to turn your head these days to see an example of how paper's time is fading like a Sunday supplement left out in the sun. The Wall Street Journal reported that advertisers are pumping more money than ever into online communications, at the expense of print ads:

Advertisers continue to aggressively increase spending on Internet ads, with close to half of them cutting spending on traditional channels to do so, according to a new survey from Forrester Research Inc.

Nearly 85% of advertisers plan to increase their online ad budgets this year, with the increases averaging 25%, according to a report from the Cambridge, Mass., research company. More than 40% of these advertisers are cutting spending on traditional ad vehicles such as magazines, newspapers, and direct mail to help fund the online increase.

Forrester forecasts that the online-ad market will grow to $26 billion annually by 2010, more than double last year's $12 billion. The report follows recent blowout earnings from Google Inc. and other Internet companies reliant on ads.

Google hosts this blog, and millions of others, on its Blogger service. Google collects nothing for giving me this forum, and somehow the company has made a killing in publishing giving things away. Advertising has been paying Google's bills, just as it always did in the world of daily print.

You can also get an eyeful of one paper after another being busted for faking their circulation numbers. A couple of stories ran in May that covered the coverage of the circulation fakes, both reported by On the Media, the fine journalism radio show produced every week by WNYC in New York.

The first story looked at how a New York area paper, Newsday, let its own news staff do the investigative work and help the paper come clean about sending newsprint to dead people. On the Media followed with a less cooperative tale from Dallas, where the Morning News had to be caught by the independent weekly Dallas Observer at similar hoodwinking. (It's even more fun to listen to the On the Media stories than read those transcripts. The Dallas Morning News segment, part of the public radio riches we all enjoy today, can be heard though your browser at www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_051305_paperchace.html)

Of course, if you use Apple's free iTunes software, available for both Windows and Mac, the world of such radio podcasts is now wide open to you. Hearing voices can be very entertaining.

This all matters a great deal at my house, an address where we've produced a paper newsletter for 10 years, mailed faithfully to a couple of thousand readers every month. I've come to believe that change is already upon us, we who have made our careers and livelihoods putting ink on paper. That's the motivation for starting a blog to convey our coverage of the HP 3000 market, rather than rely on a monthly mailing. We still receive a glut of magazine paper in our mailbox here, but it's been a long time since daily or even weekly newsprint came through the door. It's not the money, either; I can't even be bothered to pick up a copy of the free Austin weekly, The Austin Chronicle. The Chronicle is a fine Austin resource, but only when I need a portable version for a day do I reach for the racks which hold tons of newsprint.

Online communication is rising, but I don't expect paper to disappear as a medium. Its time of ascendency is over, though. Declining numbers of book readers, especially those who read literature, is old news. One year ago this week the National Endowment for the Arts reported a steep drop-off in fiction reading. Not the news this aspiring novelist wants to hear, no. But paper doesn't define publishing. Since I started this blog this spring, thousands of words have surfaced that might have remained locked away. An affordable audience though online access is slaying those paper tigers. Storytelling is still popular. We just have to expand our medium of carrying tales.

So maybe it is rocket science

2005-07-03T16:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday and today we watched the Discovery Network crow about its most famous personality. The Science of Lance Armstrong not only explains why Lance is the human best built to endure the trials of the Tour, but the program does a fine job of teaching the details of team cycling. It shows how a wind tunnel is just as important an element as a Belgian equipment manager who ages the team's tires in his basement, as if they were wines. Team Discovery is riding on five-year-old rubber this month. Here he shakes hands with the American rider who first donned the yellow jersey for this year's race, Tom Zabriskie. Lance is wearing green, for yesterday's second-place finish, but his main squeeze Sheryl Crow said on OLN he was looking forward to putting on the Discovery colors once more after today.

Discovery's interest must have been piqued by its sponsorship of the cycling team. That's an opportunity that might not have come the network's way if the USPS hadn't passed on a seventh year of underwriting the greatest bike team in the world. As I pumped the tires at 6 AM today for this morning's ride, I looked at the US Postal Service arm-warmers I bought two years ago. The Post Office may never see another chance to make its logo so famous. We watched the Tour show on OLN today with Ellen, John, Ron and his wife Sue, and somebody asked what the USPS was sponsoring instead of Lance. Abby quipped, "Stamps?"

We whet our pallets for the TV show this morning as we pushed through a sharp south wind to finish 28 miles in Burnet County, a ride that started at the town of Liberty Hill, home of "The Fightin' Panthers." It's not enough for the town's high schoolers to be panthers, mind you. They gotta be fightin' ones, too. The last seven miles reminded me why they call the town Liberty Hill: undulating road that gave up and retook the same 100 feet of elevation over and over. I breathed hard in the 90-degree heat and gave thanks for the Bicycling Magazine article on climbing. Don't go too hard in the first quarter of a hill. Sit back in the saddle. Stand up on some climbs to vary the use of your muscles. Use your pedaling upstroke as well as the downstroke. Breathe slow and deep. Not exactly science, but it's at least a process tested by more experienced riders.

Jaune Juice to Power Pedals

2005-07-02T13:20:00.000-05:00

We're reveling in the return of the Man in Yellow this morning, even if he wasn't wearing le jaune on his back today. Lance Armstrong muscled past Jan Ullrich to catch his major rival on the first Tour de France stage this morning. Ullrich had never been caught on a time trial before today. Lance rode past him like the big German diesel was standing idling. It was an amazing performance from an athlete called "too old" to win his Seventh Maillot de Jaune. Now Ulrich and the other serious contenders for the overall yellow jersey are a minute or more behind Lance.

This is the time of year when the voice of Phil Liggett rings in my ears when I climb onto my own pedals. The race commentator for OLN calls out the incredible feats from this race during July, one of the cruelest months to cycle in Austin. Even before Liggett was raving about the battle between Ullrich and Lance, I got out early with my friend Ron Wilcox, who's training for an MS 150 ride, to pedal 27 miles before 9:30. Fast, for me, with the absence of wind: 16.9 MPH. Try as I might, I couldn't make that bike computer average turn over to 17. When I rolled in, the temperature was already above 90.

It all makes for wonderful early mornings, rising soon enough to pedal before the heat arrives, then cooling off in front of the TV to the coverage of the world's greatest bike race.

There's a podcast network in Austin that will be offering commentary on the race stages. I joined the Austin Podcast Network with a few clicks of my browser this morning. I'd like to contribute to their efforts and help the group organize. The podcasters are part of the group that's putting race coverage onto the cafe deck of Central Market Central, live on 61-inch TVs, all through this month. The attention here in Austin is turned up to an unprecedented level. Last year they covered an Austin city bus in a special decal to celebrate win No. 6. They might have to cover the whole fleet if Lance manages to win No. 7.

If ever there was an event that begs for audio commentary, it would be Lance's epic try at 7, the one to retire upon. Meanwhile, the riders' images from OLN dance across my imagination, visions that power my pedals in the heart of this month's heat.

How Much Is That Doggie in the (Little) Window Gonna Change Markets?

2005-07-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

With a title like that, I feel the need to explain. This week my son Nick and his girl Elisha came over for dinner, and afterward Elisha showed me why we need to look through different windows to see how to calculate computer market share. Smaller windows, like those on cell phones, show that markets are getting bigger while they change how we share our lives.

After our pork roast in peaches and cherries — lovely recipe, Abby — we sat and talked. Elisha talked about her dog Corky, and we wanted to see pictures. A high-bandwidth, excellent resolution monitor was in my office, a room about 12 steps from our table. I figured she must've had the pictures online. Instead, she said to Nick, "Honey, would you get my phone?" Because her dog's pictures live on her Samsung mobile phone, taken in all their 600x800 glory — but ready to share anywhere.

The next morning I read a print-edition Wired magazine article that chronicles the fortunes of Lenovo. That's the Chinese company that said, "Give us an extra helping of x86" and bought out much of IBM's PC business earlier this year. (Have a look at a BusinessWeek PDF reprint about Lenovo.) Lenovo's share of the PC market when they made their purchase? Just 2%

When I got into my office I then read a message from Wirt Atmar, a brilliant scientist and longtime programmer who's company has developed lots of business software and an elegant lecture presentation software solution, QCShow. Wirt has also developed a deep skepticism about Apple's future. As a way of proving how out-of-favor the Mac is supposed to be, he said the computer has only a 1.8 % market share. But the Lenovo figure of 2% begs the question: Is Apple's 1.8% really low?

I pose another question: How do you figure a computer market's size, when Elisha's Samsung cell phone steps in to do a PC's task? People like her and Nick, in their 20s and with the full attention of the consumer companies like Apple, have a broader idea of what to use to share their lives. I think the millions of iPods, which now display photos, track calendars, and this week can play independent radio podcasts — these count as parts of the market.

Apple's not going anywhere, not as long as it keeps redefining the iPod as an information platform. I disagree with Wirt. Intel-Apple alliance I mentioned a month ago won't change this fundamental part of Apple's identity: Thinking different. Lots of portable hard disks were on the market when the iPod surfaced. Apple was the first to decide a tiny disk and an easy interface could open the gateway to sharing. Yesterday I put my calendar on my iPod, so when I go to a Hill Country Ride for AIDS planning meeting I don't double-schedule anything. Easier than lugging a laptop, and an information habit well outside the idea of "market share."

As a customer I don't give a damn about market share. This isn't movie box office we're talking about here, it's computing tools. Maybe the future will show improvement for Apple's Mac. If the Mac can manage to increase its market share by just two-tenths of a point, then using the math above, it will be as successful as Lenovo.

The comparison won't convince some people. They'll think Apple will be ready for a fall, since it's Apple, doing something different than selling a PC enslaved to Windows. Difference can cause concern for pragmatists.

All I know today is that the size of that doggie in Elisha's window — small, compared to a PC picture — makes the market for computing a lot bigger than just the number of desktops or laptops. We want to share everywhere.

Freestones and Freewheeling

2005-06-26T15:53:00.000-05:00

Today I rode Creek Road along Onion Creek with Abby, John and Ellen, a circle cruise beside sheep ranches, longhorn cattle pastures and the persistent mid-summer flow of a Hill Country creek. The creek fluttered across the dams with a trickling personality, calmer than on the ride this spring when we last traveled beside it. We started at 8, to avoid the hottest part of the day, following County Road 190, known as Creek Road to the locals, between the Henley VFD and Dripping Springs.

The route's elevation is pretty tame, at least compared to the hard work of riding up FM 165 from Blanco to Henley. But all the freewheeling, just coasting downhill or on level ground, gave me time to look for the wildlife to the side of the road and penned up behind rancher's fences. Near the end of the ride I looked up the road to see an eight-foot snake — rattler, cottonmouth, something huge — stretched across the pavement, warming itself. The snake was immobile, with about a two-foot stretch of road open in front of the head of the beast. You call out lots of warnings while you ride, but not too often is the call "big snake in the road." You have to get well out into the country to use that one.

After the ride we had brunch at the Sunset Cafe in Blanco, where they serve the Wagon Wheel Pancake. Eat three of them and they are free. You save the $5.75 that way, but probably spend at least as much in gym membership working off the calories. Vast pancakes that fill a dinner place and stand a half-inch thick. Abby and I split just one, smothered with tiny blueberries.

Beyond the pancakes lay the freestone peaches, now in season and at roadside stands along US 290 in Stonewall and Fredericksburg. Near the end of June I try to make a point of shopping for Texas peaches out there, because the freestones — which split open clean and leave the stone free — are among the last kinds of peaches to come in. The four of us split a $17 box of "Ripes," some with a bruised spot, all picked a few days earlier. Abby and I took home our 12 pounds of peaches for $8.50. We've been dividing them up this afternoon between fridge holding box and brown paper sack for ripening.

Pre-dawn posted-up jubliation

2005-06-24T07:14:00.000-05:00

I've been up since 4 this morning, prowling the Web for the torrent of stories posted about the Spurs' championship win. The daily newspaper writers have to file within a few hours of the game, so I gave it until sunup Eastern time before I started to check. There were 4,000 stories listed on Google News. I wallowed in the print coverage like the old sportswriter than I am. TV is fun, but the real story is still in the words.

The house was dark and quiet, but it surely was neither last night while our TV unreeled the victory story. The greatest moment was probably the last three minutes of the last quarter, with Timmy earning that MVP trophy by dropping a bucket from way over in Bruce Bowen's territory, baseline corner, followed by kicking a pass out for Manu's three-pointer. Drove the Spurs' lead to seven, I'm screaming and jumping up and down, Detroit calls a timeout, Abby's standing in front of the TV hollering as if she's on the floor of the SBC center, where we know the real fans don't even sit down in a Finals game. I remember standing in front of my seat in 2003, screaming at the crowd around me, "Everybody, up on your feet. We want to win!"

Ah, the delicious madness of sports. This year was different, like it meant so much more, because we'd tasted the last title up close, and then so far away at the final game. We were watching during the last title game in 2003 from a bar in Victoria, Canada, screaming at the TV there, too. Bemused Canadians would stroll by and say, "So, there's a basketball series going on, eh? Who's playing?"

I'm sure they feel the same way when they come to the States and see most people ignoring hockey. But once the Spurs won in 2003, we were completely cut off from the glory of the aftermath. No newspaper coverage, because we headed off to Tofino the next morning, the start of a stunning vacation in a haven of eagles, bears and otters. But no Spurs.

This morning I didn't have the wildlife to entertain me, but I read a few dozen stories, looking for the sharpest columnists. I liked William C. Rhoden's column in the NY Times, recalling the last game 7. Seattle's Steve Kelley filed a nice one, putting Duncan in his rightful place in NBA history. Only one other player has lost all 11 teammates from his title team, and then won again with a completely new crew: Bill Russell. A fellow whose caliber Duncan will match, given a few more seasons.

Meanwhile, Mike Wilbon, who hasn't gotten a single prediction correct in his Pardon the Interruption poodle-dog TV performances — he picked the Pistons less than two hours before last night's tip-off, like he's picked against the Spurs all through the postseason — well, he had the grace to flip-flop and give Duncan his due in today's paper. Not much crow will be eaten for the TV, though. Maybe Wilbon knows something about football. Watching the USA Today basketball writer David Dupree hack down Wilbon's assumptions, that was priceless.

JA Adande wrote about Pop's place in the coaching pantheon, too. A modest guy with three title rings and three superstars locked up until 2010. Adande wrote, "You won't see Popovich writing a book — either a motivational manual or an expose — and you won't hear him hogging the spotlight. When someone asked him to assess his role in his team's success the other day, he snapped, 'Next question.' "

Pop is a fellow who said on TV, as his first comment when he was handed the trophy, "I don't know how we did it."

The newest fun of all was capturing the podcast from the Detroit TV station that clipped all those post-game interviews. It takes more than 100 games to win a title in the NBA these days, especially against a team as good as the Pistons. Listening to the glory of these moments, removed by a few months, will be another sweet plum that two more years of technology brings.

Through the night and into the dawn I pulled on my old editing skills, the ones I first practiced at The Daily Texan newsdesk while editing the best UPI wire stories in college. Finding the best was easier this morning. It didn't take much skill to round up the story of a team from a small sports market that has the best winning record of any in sports since '97. Academy opens at 9, with plenty of Spurs gear on sale.

Alas, no tickets, only TV

2005-06-22T13:07:00.000-05:00

At two seconds past 12 Noon, not a single Spurs ticket was available from the Ticketmaster Web site. At any price. In any section. I doubt that the first Game Seven in the NBA Finals since 1994 was really available to non-season-ticket holding fans. It sure wasn't available to us, unlike our 2003 Finals foray.

Okay, not entirely unavailable. For about seven grand, we can attend in the best seats. The link on the right hand side of this page for eTickets promises,

SEC: 24 ROW: 3
Across from Spurs bench - seats are very close to David Robinson & Eva Longoria

$3,425.00 each

At least it didn't cost us that much to attend a couple of Finals games in 2003. There's always the drive to Fatso's, the San Antonio sports garden where the Spurs fans hang out. Or maybe we can watch at something as simple as the Cheatham Street sports bar, just down the street from our rent house in San Marcos. I watched a conference semifinals game there last May, a night when a domestic beer was $2 a pint and the chairs were full of college kids.

I walked in at 11, since the Spurs were playing late on the road in LA against the hated Lakers. Most of the hardback wooden chairs were full of students, though a few teachers were in evidence. A table opened up just minutes after I walked into the Cheatham Street River Pub, right in front of the big-screen TV. The table was a carved-out, shellacked plank bolted in place right in front of the TV. Not moving. Meant to watch TV from. Though it was littered with empties and soggy napkins, I moved in anyway and ordered one of those $2 beers.

It's two-dollar Sierra Nevada night, an evening deep in the University's finals season. When my beer shows up, I leave a dollar under the napkin for the waitress. A young man stands next to me. He wears a Houston Texans hat backwards on his medium-short haircut and asks if I'm waiting for group to join me. After all, I'm sitting at a table big enough for eight, a table empty but for me and him. He takes a chair when I report I'm on my own for the night. He juggles a frosted beer glass, a rocks glass of something brown, and a pitcher of Bud Lite. He is Brazos, he tells me, and then introduces his friend Thomas. Then Brazos waves over a couple of Hispanic girls, slim and a little drunk, but only a little. The shorter one keeps busy playing with her cell phone. He introduces them as Cheryl and Theresa, and we shake hands all around, very polite.

This is my moment to share something about myself. I tell Brazos I'm holding tickets for Game 5, to be played next in the series, after he takes note of my "Champs Again" Spurs t-shirt. I wear my colors over my heart tonight.

The pub is loud and full of laughter. It's already less than an hour before last call, which arrives at midnight by local ordinance. But I don't know how short the drinking time has become. Brazos asks me, "What do you think this town needs that it doesn't have?" A great icebreaker question. "A place to drink beer and watch movies all at once," I reply, because I enjoy the Alamo Drafthouse. Brazos nods, passes along my answer to Thomas. He's with his friends, people close enough that later on, when he lights his cigarette, Cheryl takes it out of his hands and takes a puff. They have shared more than this one Marlboro.

The Lakers surge on the TV. My heart sinks with each of their buckets. They retake the lead from the Spurs, and then it swings back a few more times. Finally LA pulls away on Kobe's deadly accuracy, all the more plain to me from the big screen. I must look depressed, because Brazos tries to buy me a beer. But it's already past last call. I have nursed my pint glass like the Spurs nursed their lead, for nearly an hour. The Spurs' hopes for tonight are as drained as my glass. In the last five minutes of the game, a waiter comes by to count down the time until the table must be cleared of glasses and pitchers. 10 minutes left to drink, then 5, then he announces "one minute," although the Spurs have more than that left on their clock in LA.

Finally the waiter swings past us like Kobe crossing above the arc on the TV, scooping up the glasses and pitcher like so many loose balls under the rim. Time runs down and the Spurs lose in LA. I leave the pub before the last horn sounds on the four pub TVs. People trickle out slowly behind me, only some engaged in the game's outcome. There's other things to do with an evening, after all, besides mope over a ballgame. Like Chris Rock says about nights that single folks spend with each other, "there's fucking to do!" A few more jokes to be told, laughs to be wrung from lipsticked mouths with straight, white teeth.

I think about the outcome and try to force a smile. Game Four evens the Spurs' chances at 2-2, and now I know I hold tickets for me and Abby to see "the Pivotal Game Five" down at the SBC, the night after next. Well, actually tomorrow night, I correct myself, since it's already past midnight here while I head down the street to the little Rio Vista house. I totter home a bit unsteady on my feet after my one beer, slip a little in the mud on the corner from the spring rains. Like the Spurs, I think, slipping in the adulation of winning their first two games in this 2004 series. I comfort myself with the hope they can right themselves back home in the Texas night to come.

That night I didn't know we'd soon be witnesses to the nightmare of the .4 second miracle Lakers shot in Game Five, the crusher that ushered in elimination. So there are times when it stings less to be outside the arena. I will take that as some comfort against the worst possible outcome tomorrow night, when the Spurs try to win their first Game 7 Finals contest, while we watch on a TV somewhere.

Hope for Game Seven

2005-06-22T08:27:00.000-05:00

We heard this sentiment several times yesterday on TV and the radio. "I'm just a fan," one NBA analyst said. "I just want to see a Game Seven."

Now we all get what they wanted. In a few hours, I hope Abby and I get what we want: Tickets for that Game Seven.

Two years ago, the first two games of the NBA Finals were ours. We could buy enough to get some for friends. In 2003 fewer people had broadband Internet access, though, so our DSL lines got us a quicker link to the Ticketmaster site than many others used. That was the story we told afterward. It might be a different one today, with SBC spreading its DSL for the last two years. Irony, at that, since the game will be played in the SBC Center.

Ticketmaster is the only way into the arena. Nothing is being sold at the SBC box office. There are those who will want to call, but I have to wonder how many phone orders get filled.

Tuesday's game tickets — those few thousand left to sell — sold out in less than two minutes. We have hope that since we have to weather a Game Seven, Where Anything Can Happen, we can enjoy the ticker tape down the highway, too.

It all flows around Tim Duncan, our superstar. He said last night he's counting on the lift the home fans will give him. We hope to be among those helping out.

That will happen if the Spurs don't do something they seemed to want last night. Like a that torrent of three-point shots, as if everybody wanted to be Big Shot Bob. 8 for 28 won't win a title from outside the arc. Timmy says "we played all year to have home court." We're glad, since his home is not too far from ours.

A Hurricane from Argentina

2005-06-10T09:30:00.000-05:00

Manu Ginobili made landfall on the Pistons' hopes of stealing Game 1 at the SBC Center last night, a tropical storm of slashing offense. Manu dropped 15 in the final quarter on a team that prides itself on defense. It says a lot for San Antonio's hope to retake their title when they can run with the defenseless Suns, then steal enough points against the No. 2 defensive NBA team. Here's he's washing over Detroit's Carlos Arroyo, who the Pistons can play as much as they'd like, if you ask me.

We drove back from dinner at The County Line (get yours here) quick to see the start of the game. The BBQ palace on a finger of Lake Austin not only has great sauce, but education for the many out-of-towners enjoying Texas culture. Like this language lesson, which plays nonstop in the restrooms.

The game's start on ABC turned out to be a Will Smith performance with 40 backup dancers and fireworks. The network's gotta sell this one, because its primary element is for advanced basketball fans: defense. Like a 2-1 game in baseball, instead of the juiced-up homerball slugfests the casual fan enjoys.

North of here in Dallas, where the Mavs could not climb past those ill-defending Suns, sportswriters were already taking up the chant: This will be a boring series. Where's the offense? This defensive style of basketball is offensive. And so on. But they had to admit the Spurs can play whatever kind of ball is needed to win. And defenseless contenders need not apply:

Most elite teams impose their will or style of play on the opponent. Not San Antonio. This team is a chameleon willing to adapt to whatever style is needed.

The Spurs needed to average 108.2 points to beat Phoenix. All they needed this night was 84 points for a comfortable victory.

Here's another way to put the difference. The Spurs and Suns combined for 235 points in the first game of the conference finals. The Spurs and Pistons combined for 153 in this one.

Now we have an idea of just how bad the Suns' defense is.

The story at the Dallas Morning News, by way of the Knight Ridder wires, does point out that smothering defense — the Pistons didn't even score 70 — is easier when your opponent is playing bad.

I think there's a reason for the bad play. It wears Silver and Black, and plays enough defense to win. And while those shots clang on the other end, somebody who wasn't born in the USA — Manu, or Tony Parker, or Tim Duncan — is making landfall at the Spurs' end of the court.

They score. You don't. That's a great definition of what Detroit coach Larry Brown calls "the right way." It's only 1-0 now. The Spurs have to prove it all over again on Sunday night. Because when you play against a team that defends, you hope for the hurricane to break over their seawall.

And so my Spurs shirt and my "swingman" NBA shorts — the latter purchased two years ago in the SBC gift shop during the Spurs' last title run — those silver and black clothes go up on a hangar until Sunday, not to be washed. There's the scent of winning in them along with the smell of barbecue, floating in the steamy Texas heat of June, a great month to be able to continue cheering about basketball.

A Bright Light Winks Out

2005-06-08T11:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I learned that Bruce Toback died. He was a leading light among HP 3000 experts, but far more than that accomplishment can catalogue his genius. I got to know him at first when we worked together on a project in the 1980s; I edited The HP Chronicle and he agreed to contribute a column on languages, if I remember correctly. What stands out much better after all these years was Bruce's sense of humor and scope of intelligence. He and his wife Vicki founded a software company, Office Products Technology, first out of the LA area and then from Phoenix, where they relocated to start their family together.

Bruce was about my age when he died, so the news of his death by heart attack was sudden and sad and of course, a little scary. For the last several years we were both members of a virtual community of HP 3000 veterans — so I got to enjoy his writing, thinking and research even more for the past three years than during those few months when I was lucky enough to call him "one of my writers." He wrote more than 800 messages during the three years since I'd joined this community. He posted on a range of subjects as vast as ice skating, digital photography, real estate transactions, Mac OS X programming, percussion instruments and their science — the list of what he was interested in seemed endless.

The tributes poured in about from the HP community during this week. People told stories about his attention to detail (what kind of light bulb contacts are used in the UK, in preparation for a presentation there) or his devotion to accuracy in education (he and Vicki took their kids down the home schooling path, went one story, because the school was teaching electromagnetism in error, and Bruce couldn't get them to correct their cirriculum.) Many of his colleagues said they wished they knew him better. Through the writing he left behind on the Internet (just type "toback" into the address field on the HP 3000 newsgroup search engine), he won't be gone completely.

His programming lies at the heart of Formation, a ROC Software product which Bruce created as a product for Tymlabs, an extraordinary HP software company here in Austin during 1980s and early 90s. He could also demonstrate a sharp wit as well as trenchant insight. From a couple of his messages:

HP engineer [about a Webcast to encourage migration]: During the program, we will discuss the value and benefits of Transitioning from the HP e3000 platform to Microsoft's .NET.

Bruce: Oh... a very short program, then.

After PFC Jessica Lynch became a media celebrity for being rescued during the Iraq invasion, then celebrated in a song:

I have to wonder if all this attention would have been lavished on, say, a PFC James Lynch. My guess is that if the rescued POW had not been a comely female of prime reproductive age, we might have learned more about the folks who actually did the rescuing.

-- Bruce (who's not saying whether he's pro- or anti-war, but who's definitely anti-coverage-of-war-as-sporting-event)

A fellow of wry humor, Bruce was a realist and optimist all at once. He wrote a fabulous Web-based summary of the 3000 newsgroup traffic for many years during the 90s for the HP user group Interex, entries often full of wit. He kept up; just from reading his more than 800 posts in that community in the years since I joined, I find he was interested in new colorization algorithms, wrote a QCShow player for the Mac, developed a demo server for RETS (an open standard for exchanging real estate transaction) -- and yet he had squirreled away an HP Journal article on HP EGS, a 20-year-old graphics system run on a minicomputer, and his last post noted the revival of assembly language programming.

Through it all, Bruce seemed to be having fun. He once noted a study which reported about 10 percent of all tech gifts would be damaged after the year-end holidays by enraged low-tech users, then added, "Go team!" And I could always feel a kindred spirit in his passion for the Mac's rebirth. He was compiling a list of books "at arm's reach" by HP 3000 technical community members in the weeks before his death, a great idea that was as inclusive as it was incisive. Perhaps his lesson as he left us was to keep your mind open about the relative value of past wisdom and future knowledge. He certainly displayed his gifts for both in the HP community.

He leaves behind a wife and two children, the part of his life that I suspect shone the brightest for him. He told this story on himself in a message about his courtship with Vicki:

Well, as long as we’re confessing, I did take my wife Vicki to HP CSY (or whatever it was called in January, 1978) while on our honeymoon. We had a romantic lunch in the company cafeteria, after which we picked up the full HP3000 manual set I had ordered (all 11 volumes). We then set out on a drive through the redwoods in the mountains south of Santa Clara. I drove while Vicki read selected passages from the Instruction Set and Intrinsics manuals.

N.B., for newlywed techies: I have been paying for this ever since.

For any of us in the HP community who knew him, even a little bit, we'll miss his light, always reflected in his humor.

Tony's Doubts

2005-06-07T08:21:00.000-05:00

"Doubt" won the Tony for Best Play Sunday night, and its star Cherry Jones won her second Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Play. Newsday said the play came closest to sweeping, with awards for Play, Director, Leading Actress and Featured Actress:

www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/nyc-tonyso605.story

The leading actor in the play, Brían F. O'Byrne, won a Tony last year. This award goes to actors in consecutive years about as often as Oscar visits a mantle two years running. The TV broadcast had its quirks, like playing nine-time Tony winner Mike Nichols off the stage when his acceptance speech for directing "Spamalot" ran long. You'd think that nine Tonys might earn you an extra 60 seconds. But the American Theatre Wing is just grateful for the TV exposure — those $90 seats don't sell themselves — so the show is a slave to the CBS commercial schedule. Lots of drug ads throughout, another oddity.

Spamalot's TV number was a takeoff on "American Idol," so the joke was lost on me. A friend saw the play this spring and said

I was a bit worried after the first couple of numbers in our musical tonight that I actually COULD have produced the play with a high school drama class. Then things got rolling and it was a full on knee slapper! If you liked "Holy Grail" you'll enjoy the musical adaptation, they've changed it up quite a bit, but the favorite bits are there.

NY Times critic Ben Brantley says "Doubt" will be able to tour easily with its modest cast and set requirements. You have to wonder if it will ever make it onto the community theatre circuit. Maybe only at the braver companies. Pederasty plays probably still aren't homespun fare, even if two of them were nominated for Best Play this year.

Empire Here We Come

2005-06-06T21:01:00.000-05:00

After Apple schooled its users that Intel's chips are slower than IBM's, Apple today announced that Intel's processors will drive Macs starting in 2006. But an AP story, which is now legion on Web sites that should be doing a better job, like Silicon Valley.com, relies on a single opinion to damn the decision. Nathan Brookwood concludes, somehow, that the switch in processors will reduce Apple's market share.

Apple, meanwhile, told its developers today how easy it will be to modify their programs for the new architecture. HP has said the same thing about shifting to Itanium. It's always easy, according to the vendor who's mandating the change.

The AP story uses the typical journalist's trick of saying "analysts" when they mean only one. As if there were others who agreed with Brookwood, but couldn't provide a better quote. Brookwood says "each time there's an an architecture shift, many of its customers and partners say enough is enough."

That reflects a little bias, I'd say. Or if true, then HP's in some deep trouble, too, considering the breadth of architecture shift it prompts in moving to another of Intel's products. "Enough is enough" suggests the customer is already in distress.

I guess it's just too wild to imagine that Intel chips in Macs might give some weary Windows users, growing anxious about viruses that bog down their computers, a way to run both OS X and Windows on a single, low-cost box. Apple said today it is resigned to people buying Apple's next-year boxes to run Windows. However, it proposes to keep MacOS from booting on anything other than an Apple-brand computer. (That ought to sound familiar to the HP 3000 customers out there.)

That Apple move begs the question, "Why do people buy hardware from Apple, when it's so different from PC makers like Dell?"

The difference hasn't switched for Apple users: OS X. Until we descend into the crowded and gritty streets of Windows, we can probably still enjoy a measure of security difficult to ensure while using Microsoft's OS. I still believe that any moat that separates me from the PC world's insecurities, be it processor or OS, is welcome. Spyware, the worst of the lot, simply isn't a factor on a Mac. Yet.

It's far too early to determine the impact on Apple's market share from this manufacturing change, one that should not force changes to the thing that keeps Macs more secure. Any Mac downtick, of course, will be immediately attributed to this announcement by analysts who look for people saying "enough is enough." Some can't get enough. For Mac users this might spark a run on the G5 models. Out on macintouch.com today it said "Get PowerPC Macs while you still can!" from Amazon.com.

Nearly every report of the AP-grade seems to confuse the Mac's CPU with its OS while discussing differences. Unless the spyware writers can make time to code for both the Nextstep-based Mac OS as well as Windows, today's switch may be a change on a par with dropping the Motorola 68000 line 10 years ago.

Typical of the misunderstanding from the AP: Apple had a higher market share in the mid-80s, before it left the Moto chips behind. Aside from being ancient history in computing timelines, this wisdom overlooks the fact that during the 80s Macs had a bigger share because Windows was first non-existent, and then too green to be of much serious use. It was the DOS prompt vs. the Mac interface.

From my viewpoint, OS X didn't harm my Mac ownership. It simply delivered a great bounty of software to us Mac users. The old Macs didn't ship with Apache or FTP, for example, or run things like perl.

That AP writer was in a hurry, called one analyst, and wrote a lead with sizzle on a story that was supposed to be a less-sexy recount about the history of Apple's IBM relations. Some attention to the true nature of "Think Different" would have been more enlightening.

To learn more in three minutes, check out the NPR report of this evening. At least that reporter understands the difference between the OS and the CPU:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4682760

Don't Believe It's a Night of No Doubt

2005-06-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

Tonight, while the country won't be distracted by basketball playoffs, another contest takes the court in the East: The Tonys. In the past Abby and I have watched the awards show like a sampler for upcoming trips to Broadway and New York's other theatre. There's no such trip on this year's calendar, but if there were, I'd want to see the play that could win tonight's Best Play Tony, "Doubt."

The Best Play award is the place where Broadway's invention has gone to live. So many of the theatres on Broadway fill their seats with shows that are sure bets. Half of this year's Best Musical-nominated shows rode the rocket of movie-based material, stories like the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Strong film background packs them in — just ask the producers of The Producers. The imitation has gotten so profound that Tonys have added "Best Revival Of" awards during the past five years, to re-award the likes of Twelve Angry Men, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, La Cage Aux Folles or Sweet Charity.

But at one point, all of those classics were lifting the curtain for the first time on Broadway, just like Doubt did this spring. The play, like many of the Broadway Best Play entries, had an earlier production debut on another New York stage, The Manhattan Theatre Company. Its author, John Patrick Shanley, has had a busy season in New York's theatre over the past year, with two other shows, Sailor's Song and a revival of his Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. This is the kind of season that creates a playwright's legend, the kind that All About Eve refers to when it describes its character Lloyd Richards, who's had a string of dramatic hits in that movie.

Shanley's play steps into some deep water. The New York Times sums it up this way:

Set in the Bronx in 1964, it is structured as a clash of wills and generations between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the young priest who may or may not be too fond of the schoolboys in his charge. He is played by Brian F. O'Byrne (a Tony winner this year for "Frozen"), whose deceptively easygoing, layered performance is the perfect counterweight to that of Ms. Jones.

This is the sort of play the Tonys love, or ought to. High-octane talent, like the actress who plays Sister Aloysius, 49-year-old Cherry Jones, the first openly lesbian performer to win a Best Actress Tony back in 1995. The play explores a tough subject, handled by an expert author. And maybe, with the play's director and two stars also nominated, Tony voters will take some satisfaction in giving a former Hollywood screenwriter a Tony to go with his Pulitzer Prize for "Doubt." Shanley, after all, won an Oscar for the screenplay of Moonstruck. The Times theatre critic Ben Brantley is predicting multiple awards for Doubt. That's of little doubt. But what a season for any writer: To place a Pulitzer and a Tony in the same year onto a shelf that already holds an Oscar. Shanely's IMDB profile begins, "After he was thrown out of Catholic school in New York..." He's a purist in the sense of that Lloyd Richards character, too. His contract with Hollywood insists not a single line of his screenplays can be changed. A tough point to negotiate, without a doubt.

Blogging for a Living?

2005-06-03T07:48:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal has found evidence of it: There's a livelihood in blogging. Stonyfield Farm hired a woman last year to post to four blogs which the dairy company maintains on its Web site, according to the WSJ story. The trick, according to a Stonyfield official in the article, is to be conversational. This encourages people to post comments. That's the goal of a good blog for a company: To invite a community to begin to build and connect.

Stonyfield's Web log sites — what it calls its "Cow"munities — maintained by chief blogger Christine Halvorson, are at www.stonyfield.com/weblog. The topics vary:

Strong Women Daily News: The latest news and insights from Strong Women partners

The Bovine Bugle: Daily moos from the Howmars Organic Dairy Farm

The Daily Scoop: Daily life at the yogurt works, and daily ways we try to nurture and sustain the environment.

There's also blogs for healthy kids and one for parents called Baby Babble.

It's all in a tasty cause. Stonyfield's yogurt products are tasty and as healthy as you'd want, from very low fat to luscious. Nearly all of its yogurt line is organic. While you might imagine it's a modest-szied company, Stonyfield is owned by Group Danone. Yes, the organic alternative is part of the world's largest dairy, water and biscuit company, $13.8 billion Dannon.

But that's a good thing. It makes buying organic easier, because Stonyfield yogurts are available in lots of stores. Blogging at its heart is just communication for a community , something I've been doing for a living since 1982, when I wrote my first articles as the Burnet County editor for my first community paper, The Highlander in Marble Falls, Texas. If you're looking for a job in the blogging field, there's a recruiter site to help: Bloggeropoly.

While that sounds pretty corporate, you can do the work to spread good. My friend Ellen located a great movie that promotes organic buying in the store. Called "Store Wars," it follows the quest of Cuke Skywalker and other vegetable friends. Natch, the Stonyfield blog includes a link to Store Wars, a fun 5-minute film. You need Flash to installed on your computer to watch it.

www.storewars.org/flash

Oh yeah, the living I mentioned. Stonyfield's CEO Gary Hirshberg says he wants to hire a couple more full-time bloggers within a couple of years, according to the WSJ. Blogger pay can be good, too. A listing on the job site Dice.com for a blogger post at Flycell, a game and ringtone provider, included a salary of $50,000 to $70,000 a year.

Consider the Light an audition, Gary.

Finally, the Finals

2005-06-02T11:28:00.000-05:00

They overtook a speeding team like radar waves, coming up suddenly in the Suns' rear-view with suffocating defense and a surprise scoring kick. Now the team that had to fight for its dap all season has one week to bask in the light glinting off the Western Conference NBA trophy. San Antonio's Spurs open their third title series next Thursday night, filling the town with pride and the SBC Center's seats with butts.

But the team won't sell a single Finals ticket at the arena. To buy one you have to sign up for a random ticket number at Ticketmaster's Ticket Center locations around San Antone. They call out a number at noon on Saturday, and that number holder becomes first in line, limit four tickets. If it's 37, and you hold 36, you're last in line. Or you can call at noon on Saturday and take your chances in the phone lottery, or push through the spurs.com or ticketmaster.com Web sites. It's worth it to feel the energy of 18,000 people focused on one outcome, blown away by the maniac drive of Manu, snarling for the ball and not stopping until he's on the floor or the ball has sailed through the hoop. I got to see him in that building once this year, against Houston. He scored six points in 2:11 to carry the Spurs out of a 79-76 squeaker lead. Around a couple of Tony Parker steals and baskets, Manu led the Spurs to a 12-point lead in 141 seconds.

Yeah, they can score that fast this year, even against a team that can D-up like the Rockets. So the Finals will be worth our money and time, cuz a fan never knows when a postseason run can dry up and leave you short of the title round. Sometimes it just takes a miracle shot with 0.4 seconds left, like the one Abby and I watched down in SBC last year when the Lakers rubbed out the Spurs' hope of a repeat. I can admit it — I want to be present for an antidote to that kind of moment: late-game magic to deliver a third win to keep us alive, or — dare I dream it — the confetti raining down after the title game.

We managed two games' worth of Finals in 2003, our first championship tickets, when David Robinson was wrapping up his career with a second championship ring drive. It only took DSL-speed Internet service and leaving the Ticketmaster Web page loaded in the browser to get tickets for each game. Yeah, and a little luck, like anybody hopes for in sports.

We're holding back until Game 6 this time around. A sixth game in the Finals is just about a certainty for the Spurs, since they'll face a stronger defense from either Miami or Detroit. (My money is on the Pistons to repeat, since they've got championship experience from last year). That championship savvy led the Spurs past the Suns last night, as well as in the other three wins. The Suns stayed right in every game they lost, even to the last minute. But staying in a game is one level. Remaining focused to hold a lead — three times on the road, no less — is the next level one that comes easier when you've already taken two titles over the past six years.

Tim Duncan, the only Spur on the court who can claim that much championship experience, turned his game around in 48 hours. Monday night he was missing free throws (nine!), baskets in the paint, and his leadership touch. But then on the Suns' last night of their season, Duncan had more points before the half than he scored in all of Monday's game. At one point he scored 10 points in a row in the game's early going. He wanted to erase the TV highlight reels of his struggles. Two days after converting all 15 of his free throws, Duncan missed nine of 12. The Austin paper made fun of his struggles from Monday:

Note to NBA: stop production on the Tim Duncan free-throw instruction video. Hold off, for now, on engraving the Western Conference championship trophy.

In last night's close-out game, Tim made three of four free throws.

Timmy also led the team to the Finals in his classic style: He led the Spurs Wednesday in minutes played, field goals made, rebounds, blocked shots and offensive rebounds. He said afterward he wanted to "rectify" the mistakes of his Monday night in front of the local fans. that's the kind of old-school leader the Spurs count upon, a guy who takes the burden of defeat on himself.

He didn't have to carry his team, though. The top reason the Spurs got beyond the Suns — go-go guys who are going to be back in the late rounds of the playoffs for years to come — that reason was Manu Ginolili, muscling rebounds, driving to the basket for foul shots, dishing dimes out when the defense swarmed him.

Finally, Tony Parker's perimeter shot arrived. Though he had a rough 8-21 night overall, the two 3-pointers he sank halfway through the third quarter let the Spurs pull away during a quarter where San Antonio usually struggles. MVP Steve Nash hit a jumper to pull the Suns within three and the arena in Phoenix exploded. San Antonio didn't take a timeout. They focused to run off 21 seconds of shot clock and then Parker delivered, twice in the next 32 seconds, his second shot set up by a Robert Horry steal:

7:24
Steve Nash makes 15 ft jumper. 59-56

7:07
Tony Parker makes three point jumper. 62-56

7:03
Amare Stoudemire loses ball, stolen by Robert Horry.

6:48
Tony Parker makes 25-ft three point jumper. 65-56

6:46
Phoenix Full Timeout.

That sequence made me turn to Abby and say, "They can win this game tonight." Because Parker showed the hand the Spurs couldn't play Monday, and he tipped the balance of power on a night when Amare Stoudemire took whatever he wanted at the basket for the Suns — except for a clutch 3-pointer that rimmed out with 13 seconds left. That basket that would have pulled Phoenix within one possession. It was the kind of miss that Horry experienced against the Spurs in 2003, a ball that was halfway down and popped out, along with the Suns' hopes for a fairytale season. He's now got a chance to pad his championship resume, with a third team, for his sixth ring.

Meanwhile we've got a week off from the delicious tension, Abby and I, time to let our heart-rates recede and enjoy the grappling in Miami and Detroit throughout this weekend. We'll take either opponent, because the Spurs are past the Suns. The right kind of D-up basketball prevailed, for now. Having beaten the three hottest offensive teams in the NBA to get to the Finals, San Antonio's arena will now thrum with defense, the rippling notes of "Zombie Nation" during the timeouts, and the surge of Spurs experience in the hardest of moments. We needed our own Finals experience to weather gales of emotion while watching on TV, then listening to the WOAI radio call from masterful Bill Schoening. This is a broadcaster so good in just his fourth season of NBA basketball that he doesn't need a color commentator. (Here's a Real Player clip of an interview of him during the Spurs last title season, in 2003.) When the going gets nervy during close games, Bill's call, full of detail and empathetic emotion, makes it tolerable for us rabid fans.

Basketball has at least four more games for a team fast enough to overtake and tough enough to win it all. In San Antonio you can buy D-Rags, black cloth to wave and Spur on the defense.

Down here, we believe it's D-fense that wins titles.

But the Suns series proved the Spurs can run, too. They have Timmy, Manu to slash and steal the ball, Parker to teardrop, and Big Shot Bob Horry to make crucial steals and 3-pointers. It might all be enough to get past those Wallace Boys from Detroit, or Shaq and The Flash from Miami.

Spurs in Six, I hope, just like the last time they won it all.

Getting Engaged with Mobile Upgrades

2005-06-01T07:13:00.000-05:00

Cingular wants a relationship with you. Our cell service provider wooed both Abby and I into the a deeper commitment yesterday, when all we wanted was a newer phone for my gal. Nokia's 5165 phones — so popular two years ago you could buy a colored faceplate for them on Amazon — tend to shed their batteries after awhile. The skinny battery slipped off her phone once too often, so she wanted something newer.

I suspected it would not be as simple as buying a newer phone and having Cingular activate it. But I was hopeful as we drove to the closest Cingular retail outlet. We had no luck getting upgraded over the Web; we were ATT Wireless customers who got assimilated by the Cingular/SBC Borg, and Cingular's Web site just doesn't know how to upgrade a phone that didn't start in the Cingular system. (It was our third assimilation, after starting out as GTE customers in 2001, then seeing GTE become Cingular a year later. Billing problems drove us to ATT, but I learned you can run, just not hide.)

Alas, our first stab at Cingular retail service was a bust. The tiny storefront carried the Cingular logo, but no real link to the Cingular corporate database. When we told the clerk (no, he's a sales representative) we were former ATT customers, he rolled his eyes just a bit. "I can't look you up," he said after a minute of tentative tapping on his keyboard. "If I put your number in, it will put my computer into an endless loop, because it's an ATT number."

Who knew wireless communications could wield such power?

We needed a better store. He pointed us "just across the highway" -- an extra 10-minute drive -- to another Cingular retail outlet. Three traffic lights later we walked into a much bigger store that used to be an ATT Wireless outlet. It too had been assimilated, but it retained a computer system that wouldn't fall into the Empire's Death Loop when the sales rep entered our numbers.

We're close to finished, I thought. We just have to wait for our name to be called after we sign in, find a phone Abby likes, get activated and pay up. At least that's the way ATT did it for me 18 months ago.

Oops, too simple. Seems our phone plan would not allow the computer to just sell Abby a more modern phone. No, we were on a plan for older technology — yeah, even me, who used a phone just a year-and-a-half old — so there was no way they'd just add one newer device to our service. My Nokia 3560, which I'd carried on about 5,000 miles of bike riding, would have to go, too.

I made a face that anybody could read as upset. But our rep Sally — just the luck of the draw, with three others working that day — was dilligent, persistent, and patient with my apparent frustration. She could set us up with a new plan. I wanted to resist this option, and so she moved to helping us with our immediate problem: replacing a bad battery. She went to the recycle box in the back and produced a Nokia battery for Abby's old phone, and even gave us an address of a battery replacement shop in Central Austin.

This was service. We were Cingular customers, after all, and she wanted us to leave satisfied. I asked if she could look up the end-date of our contract, to see how long I had to remain a Cingular customer. The service was good, but the options seemed designed to get us into a new contract. There are a lot fewer places to buy cell service from today, but there are options.

"March 2005," she said.

"So I'm not bound to Cingular by a contract now."

"Yes, you can shop around." Sally delivered this line as unfazed as anybody who's been told "I don't have to stick with your company." Sure, you can date around. We were still potential customers.

I had an epiphany. We didn't come to her shop to become nomads, searching for a better provider. We wanted a new phone and as few changes as possible. "Let me guess," I offered. "I bet we could both get new phones and better service for less money."

I had said the magic words. All we had to do was agree to a new contract. "Darling, we're engaged!" Sally was so enthusiastic she sold us a better rate a full day before it became official. She's activating the new phones for us today. Even trying to pick out a new number for Abby that ends in -YOGA.

Because in the cell phone world of 2005, it's all about the relationship. The phone is the least important part of the formula. That's why it's easy to get a free phone, if you sign up for service. Or a cheap phone with fun features, like a camera.

Which was another surprise on the afternoon. I just wanted a similar phone. Abby went way past the simple Nokia and into picture phone territory. "I can send you pictures of Lilias this summer when I'm at Feathered Pipe Ranch," she said. "This will be fun. And I have to get into this stuff more easily." As for me, I can talk on my new phone without an earpiece, hands-free. Good for those hour-long calls to mom, who's retired and still loves to talk. (No, it's not about calling while driving the car. Bad form. Hang up and drive.)

We all learned something yesterday. The new two-year contract we signed gave us 50 more minutes a month, nationwide service for no extra charge, and a bonus of two phones for about $60. We could have had two phones for $36 if we'd wanted to go real lowball. We were prepared to spend twice as much for just one phone.

What they want to sell you is the relationship, not that little device that you bond with because you carry it around with you all the time. But I feel like flashing my tiny Nokia 3120 like an engagement ring. "Cingular must love me — they gave me this for free!"

Crash Hits the Heart

2005-05-31T07:03:00.000-05:00

I always love to see what a filmmaker does with the first feature film after being a screenwriter. John Huston burst out of the blocks with "The Maltese Falcon," while "All About Eve" director Joe Mankiewicz started out slower, making "Backfire" in his directing debut after 17 years of writing scripts.

Paul Haggis has made more of a "Falcon" kind of splash with "Crash." He wrote "Million Dollar Baby," 2004's Best Picture, though his screenplay didn't win an Oscar. But that movie's writing was a promissory note on the payoff of Crash.

Who's Haggis? He earned nearly all of his stripes in TV, but some of the medium's best writing is on his resume. Tracy Ullman's show. LA Law. thirtysomething. Okay, he's also got credits for scripts for Love Boat and Due South. But there's 20 years of writing before he gets to make his first movie, an even longer stretch than Mankiewicz.

After I'd spent Memorial Day writing the day's news — holidays can be work days when you run your own newsletter — I took a movie break with my favorite gal and watched Haggis' fabulous story unfold at the Alamo Drafthouse. The movie carried high buzz from friends and family. You have a good idea of a movie's merit when a middle school principal in his 50s and a bank teller in his 20s both rave about it.

The movie earns its accolades. Crash brims with trouble, prejudice and heartbreak, from carjackings to the power of the stray bullet in LA. But while it paints a picture of people struggling to escape tragedy, it also gives some of them a chance at redemption. Like my friend Kate says, it's a movie where "Man falls into hole. Man climbs out of hole." We want trouble in our stories. Crash carries a story credit, something you don't see very often in modern movies. You can see why it deserves a separate credit for the story when the strands of its plot come together in a stout rope during a few scenes at the movie's end.

It helps a good story when the actors can pump up the characters. Crash has got Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser and most of all Don Cheadle, plus Sandra Bullock and Thandie Newton. The acting firepower propels dialogue crafted sharp enough to create tiny, standout roles. Watch for Keith David's commanding voice blistering off a few minutes of an arch scene as a black lieutenant in the LAPD. Hip-hoppers Ludacris and Larenz Tate play characters who expand stereotypes — so by the end of the film, the movie's tagline feels true: "You think you know who you are. You have no idea." There's even a Tony Danza scene that makes you believe he was underrated during his TV days.

Memorial Day gave us a memorable movie this year. We'll have to see a lot of films to find one better than Paul Haggis' directing debut. When you watch Dillon and Newton in their watershed second scene together, you might be moved to tears. Crash can make you cry over a story about the power of people to overcome their worst fears and hate, even if it does take a crash to shake their goodness free.

Link: Technorati on Film

Colors of our Caring

2005-05-30T13:14:00.000-05:00

You can get your badge of caring at Costco this week. Yesterday the Costco checker asked me if I wanted to donate a dollar to "The children's hospital" along with my purchase. Costco's offer to help support 170 kids' hospitals is a typical way to pry loose some giving from middle-class consumers; lately I've been approached at the movie ticket counter and the grocery, too. At a dollar a donation, there's little reason to say no. The kids' hospitals are having a telethon this coming weekend.

At Costco, though, I got more than the momentary warm glow of self-appreciation after giving my dollar. Costco gave me a plastic colored wristband to wear after I donated. Lance Armstrong's cancer foundation made these efforts as famous as the AIDS effort made the ribbon symbol. I wear a Lance wristband and a cap with an AIDS red ribbon, each organization being the originators of the icon. I'm not big on the follow-on ribbons or bracelets. Everybody gets to use whatever works to raise money or awareness. But any ribbon you see printed on a magnet — like those on pickup tailgates in our red states — might be asking for awareness on a temporary basis.

The colors associated with such things have become an issue, too. Yellow ribbons have their own tie-in, thanks to Tony Orlando and Dawn. Yellow got staked out on the bracelets by a man who's worn the color in a certain bike race every summer since 1999. But the colors are getting crowded. My friend Steve sent me a black bracelet that says, "I Did Not Vote for Bush." Green is especially crowded, the wristband that symbolizes the fights against diabetes, lukemia, depression and the slaughter in Darfur.

My Costco wristband for the Children's Miracle Network breaks into new territory. It's multi-hued, an orange-yellow blend that reflects the Network's colors. Wal-Mart is participating too; the CMN was started by Donny and Marie Osmund's mom, and it raises $300 million every year. A couple of my friends wear two of these, a conversation starter. We are learning to expect these merit bracelets from our giving, a way to wear our feelings on our wrists instead of on our sleeves.

Apple Joins the Intel Empire?

2005-05-24T07:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal broke a story about Apple, which is allegedly considering Intel as a chip supplier for Apple systems. The Mac Observer has good commentary on what this story really means; the Observer said it's not an accident that the WSJ "leaked" a story about negotiations between Apple and Intel.

This is about getting IBM to perform better in its chip-building role for Apple. Macs are powered by the PowerPC line of chips, developed here in Austin at an Apple-Motorola-IBM startup called Somerset. A great article about Apple's embrace of IBM's chips 10 years ago is up at the bott.org site, a "museum space" donated by the supplier of Mac and iPod accessories and products Dr. Bott. My latest favorite Bott product (they distribute, not make most of what they sell) is the SmartWrap, a bit of plastic you wrap your iPod earphones' cord around. My iPod experience always starts with a minute or so of untangling my earphone cord. Apparently, this is a common beginning.

If Intel does replace IBM as a chip supplier, then Apple takes one more step closer to the Wintel Empire. Some Mac users lust for the day when Apple will make a Windows computer, and join the Empire. The dark side of the force is quicker, more seductive. They miss the point — the Mac experience is built around an operating environment that's safer. Bring any part of the wild Windows community into the Mac's low-virus sanctuary and you've introduced the tangle of viral checkers and spam nests. If I don't have enough time to untangle my iPod cords, I definitely don't have time enough to unmuck my Apple computer that runs Windows.

I hope the Journal story aids Apple's ploy to press IBM for better chip development. I think of us Mac folks as the Bespin mining colony, the Cloud City of computing, "small enough not to be noticed" by the Empire, as Lando Calrissian said in The Empire Strikes Back.

Muzzle the Poodle-Dog Shouters

2005-05-23T19:04:00.000-05:00

Programs like Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn on ESPN might raise your heart rate, but they pander to lowering your sports IQ. These shows trumpet Poodle-Dog Journalism, a brand of yapping where education takes a back seat to excitement and entertainment. (To his credit, PTI's host usually says he and his partner are about to "yap about" one thing or another in his introduction. It reminds me of the line in The Natural where Roy Hobbs asks sportwriter Max Mercy if Max ever played in a game. "No," he said, "but I made it a lot more fun to watch.")

When the San Antonio Spurs reeled off 43 points in the fourth quarter of yesterday's conference finals game, the team surprised a lot of fans who rely on national media to know the NBA. The Spurs uncorked their explosion despite some desperate cramming on defense by the Suns, who seem to have skipped their D lessons and resorted to NFL-style defense, as shown at left. The local reports knew better of the Spurs offense, and pointed out that the team has a reputation of grinding out wins with penetrating defense, a strategy that glazes over the eyes of analysts on ESPN. That rep is out of date, as yesterday's shootout against the run-and-gun Suns proved. Coverage of the win also proved how little light the average sportscast sheds compared to its copious amount of heat.

Once in a while TV sports can help you learn about the game you watch. TNT led the way years ago, because it covers only the NBA in its sports lineup and it's broadcast games for more than 20 years. The network games in 1990s used Hubie Brown, who retired this year as the NBA's oldest coach after winning 2004's Coach of the Year Award, as its color analyst. Hubie is given to calling NBA players "the young man" while he explains the game, but Hubie is always teaching, so everybody must seem like a student to him. TNT is always grabbing the best talent, like scooping up ESPN's basketball reporter David Aldridge, the best in broadcast at getting the inside story on the sport. ESPN replaced Aldridge with Stephen A. Smith, a Phildelphia columnist who's only displayed a rap-style delivery and a tiny fraction of Aldridge's insights and NBA contacts.

At least Smith is fun to watch. Around the Horn gives air-time to Woody Paige, who has fallen from the ranks of regular sportswriters to become a TV personality, one whose bluster has caught on with the ESPN producers. He now works out of New York to do his three ESPN shows a day, pens a Sunday column for his Denver Post job, and appears to be polishing his performance skills while his analysis rusts. Paige can be counted on to know little other than the obvious while he predicts what will happen, crystal ball work that has been invariably cracked since he took on TV full time.

Print sports journalism can't rely on the silly haircuts and gimmicky props of TV. It must teach you something while it entertains and it's got to get closer to its subjects than a TV monitor and an earpiece. Another PTI regular, Bill Plaschke, sounds off with details and reporting insight, because Plaschke has to keep up with LA sports in his job at the LA Times. He hasn't cashed in his reporting skills for makeup tips.

ESPN's crystal ball remains a favorite product of TV sports analysis, too. Telling us what's likely to happen has all the durable value of a stick of chewing gum — tasty at first, but useless once it's consumed. I prefer the insight on TNT with Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley, former NBA stars who can entertain and educate at once. They talk about what has really happened, so you better understand what's going on during the next game's broadcast. During these NBA playoffs, ESPN reminds me that its first initial stands for entertainment, not sports.

Force-Full Weekend

2005-05-22T20:35:00.000-05:00

Nick and I lined up for the midnight show of The Revenge of the Sith late Wednesday. A few adolescents prowled the entrances in Sith capes and Vader masks, and one fellow whiled away the wait with his laptop in the theatre auditorium. Every preview shown before the film — a staggering eight — drew groans from the crowd, who applauded as the movie started. The geek factor was set on high, but not Rocky Horror Picture Show level. Despite a few bleary-eyed moments for this viewer just past his 48th birthday, the movie lived up to its hopes: The first Star Wars sequel to stand in the same rank as the original three movies. It surpassed Jedi, was a little better than Star Wars, and made a good attempt at catching the depth and character nuance of Empire.

It's earned a Megacritic rating of 68 so far, well above the 50-ish ratings of the three movies after Empire. Salon and the New Yorker were appalled at the film, but plenty of other top-line critics think George Lucas broke through with this one, at last.

Lucas has delivered a movie that doesn't care what the younglings think of it. Sith is no exercise in toy marketing, like Phantom Menace. It doesn't muff the character possibilities like Attack of the Clones did in its ill-trimmed romance scenes. It's dark and scary in plenty of places, with a few moments that make you feel just how low Anakin Skywalker falls to become Darth Vader. John Williams unreels a score that manages to strike new notes in themes he has mined in five other movies. Not a small feat. 61-year-old Ian McDiarmid steals every scene he's in as the Emperor, something you'd expect if you knew he's a theatre actor and director. Frank Oz shows us how powerful an actor's vocals can make an animated character, spark that springs Yoda like a lithe Jedi saber-wielder.

If only we could restrain Lucas from writing dialogue. Nothing's perfect, but the wooden, preachy lines remain a disturbance in his force. He still hasn't regained the courage to hire somebody like Leigh Brackett, the 65-year-old sci-fi novelist and Rio Bravo screenwriter who co-wrote Empire, then died before the movie was released. Her last project earned her a posthumous Hugo Award for the film. Although Star Wars and Jedi also earned Hugos, Episodes I and II weren't even nominated.

The story was good enough to drive me back to my VCR at home to look at the film that follows this one in chronology, Star Wars. Sith made the earlier film even more entertaining, which I think is a tribute to the character work in the new movie. Lucas hadn't done character work in many of his other movies. The brilliance of Empire came from the pen of screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan and director Irvin Kershner. Lucas was busy setting up Lucasfilm while Empire was being made.

Making a better movie than his last two installments is going to earn Lucas a windfall compared to the Episode I and II box office. Nick and I helped Sith to a $16 million total for the midnight showings alone. It's broken box office records and left its creator with money enough for producing the remaining three films, though we'll probably have to wait for those until sometime during the next decade. With Hollywood so desperate for stories that it's remaking slight vehicles like The Dukes of Hazzard, the force of Star Wars will be with us, always. Lucas, after all, is only 61, and shows no signs of slowing down, opening up a vast new studio complex on the site of the old US Army base at the Presidio. After this weekend's force, he could probably pay cash for the whole new complex.

Get Your Headlines, Googled

2005-05-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

Google delivers the news so much better than the TV or a single newspaper, but it's tough to select stories from such a bounty of links. Type a subject and you can get links to 400 reports, but 200 of them could be the same AP story in newspapers from around the world.

There's a better way to get Google News. An enterprising Japanese programmer has created a spiffy interface for the service, one that shows story headlines in sizes proportionate to their popularity. Color-coded, too. You can see what the online crowd is reading, even if it might not be the best story on the subject. It's just another way to tap into the resource that drives that $255 a share stock. You might cook up your own piggyback venture with some help from Google Hacks. Google, a company that would rather have the press interview its corporate chef than its CEO, doesn't seem to mind.

Those Geeks Got Your Excuses Ready

2005-05-17T11:09:00.000-05:00

If you have somebody to answer to Thursday, somebody who will wonder why you're not at work because of a certain opening day of a certain prequel film, the Geek Squad is ready to help with a fill in the blanks excuse note.

The Squad will help you arrest those problems with your Windows PCs and wireless networks. They also have some funny TV ads, (check out the About Geek Squad link) and they have camped out in Best Buy stores, too. Why not? Some of us smug Mac users would argue that the place where Windows PCs get sold is the scene of the crime. (Okay, there's really no wrong computer to use. Just more troublesome ones, from time to time.)

Which is why having a sense of humor about it all, like the Geeks, is bound to make the pain recede a little sooner. They've got troubleshooting book, too. It's out of date (written six years ago), especially in its comparison of Windows and Macs, written before the OS X revolution. But even then, the Geeks had to admit Macs "lead in more categories, but we believe Windows has the edge." Odd logic, yes. But face it, if you've got Windows problems, you want a Windows advocate working on them.

Bloggers Need Journalism

2005-05-16T09:56:00.000-05:00

A recent conference for bloggers included a few hours of training on standard journalism skills, according to a report from the Associated Press. The Media Bloggers Association gave 300 of its members two days of training in things like accessing and analyzing government statistics.

The association's president said there's now 8 million people blogging. ("There's eight million stories out there in the city," went a Sixties-era cop show voiceover.) Now some bloggers are getting an interest in research, having risen past the vitriol level of bare commentary. Good for them. A few more years of training, some exams and papers, and they'll have what degreed journalists have: Skills to create stories that exude more than lather.

Meanwhile, us journalists need to get Blogger, some Web design software, the time to post, and learn Javascript or know somebody who does. I think I like the equation solved from my end. But we're both headed to the same place.

At Information Week, the editors say the blogging concept is sparking record reader interaction. There's something about putting the reader comments on an equal footing with a journalist's reports, the editor says. Yeah, equality. Much better place to write and report from than calling a print reporter something like "a dead-tree journalist."

Face it, each side has something to teach the other: about immediacy and access, for the journalists. About accuracy and inclusion, striving toward balance, for the bloggers. Then there's that advertising thing. Bloggers need it. You can put your blog up in the cattle call for media buys through Blogads. Blogs with fewer than 3,000 page impressions a week need not apply. The deal makes you give up 20 percent of your revenue, plus the Visa fee, and then Blogads will put you into their cattle call. Your blog better be, as Blogads says, "laser-sharp" in its focus.

The Force Is Back With Us

2005-05-14T07:33:00.000-05:00

In reviews at Variety and The New York Times, critics say this week's Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith evokes the quality of the best of the series, The Empire Strikes Back. Variety, all about the business potential of any movie, reports that we can believe in the Force once more, after being disappointed by the last two movies:

Given the general awareness of what's going to happen, it's up to Lucas to make it exciting. Despite fans' varying degrees of loss of faith that set in with Menace and Clones, most will be inspired enough to believe again.

Variety, in its trademark telegraph styles adds, "Stratospheric B.O. is a given." And no, that doesn't mean they expect this one to stink up the theatres like Episodes I and II.

A.O. Scott in the Times says this is the best Star Wars movie George Lucas has directed. "That's right, it's better than Star Wars," he notes.

Nothing like a dark story — like my favorite, Empire, where Darth emerges as Luke's dad — to grab our hearts. Like anybody, I want to feel that surge of emotion again, experience the brain's mirror neurons I felt almost 25 years ago in the old one-screen Americana Theatre on Hancock Street in a much-smaller Austin. That old-style theatre, with one giant screen and an auditorium wide enough to have a middle aisle, it's gone. The lines wrapped around that building in June of 1980, when Empire opened. That theatre's site has morphed into a library. But PBS says that mirror neurons in brain circuitry let us "lose it completely" at the movies. That's the feeling I want to find again, the amazing sound of Yoda's voice, the thrill of Luke and Vader dueling, even though my fledgling Buddhist training tells me that some things never return, no matter how much we want to experience them again. No, that's grasping and attachment, like wanting another championship run for the Spurs to the NBA title.

At 11:50 PM, Wednesday night, the first screening unreels in Austin, at the Alamo Drafthouse North. Maybe I'll enjoy a chance encounter with my neurons there. It seems appropriate to watch the darkest side of the Force in the darkest side of the night, past midnight.

Miller's Un-Crossing

2005-05-13T22:12:00.000-05:00

Dennis Miller, the only comic ever to get both an Emmy-winning show on HBO Late Night as well as a slot on the Monday Night Football crew, signed off of cable TV tonight in his last CNBC broadcast. His show, titled uncreatively "Dennis Miller" by CNBC, saw its ratings drop after the 2004 elections to just an average of 114,000 viewers nationwide. Our Austin Chronicle alternative weekly can boast more readers than that.

Miller ran through his usual standup routine on his last show, working too hard, then interviewed New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, who was plugging her book on the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun,Becoming Justice Blackmun. Miller managed to use the word "heinous" twice during his interview, another example of his erudite broadcast vocabulary. You can watch until the end of the year and probably not find another use of heinous twice in one comedy program. At one point during ABC's Monday Night Football experiment with Miller on the team, a wireless Palm broadcast tracked his exotic language and esoteric references during the game. (The title of this blog post is a little nod to his excellence, a reference to a certain Cohen Brothers film that fell a little short of their potential, too.)

Now he's just lost his edge, drifting over into right-wing politics about the time the US invaded Iraq. On a recent appearance on the Daily Show, he said he'd lost ground because "people think I'm some kind of right-wing nut job, because I backed Bush on the war." My brother Bob's blog Wissewig chronicled that appearance, exceptional because Miller was funny once more.

Comics take a risk when they go jingo on us, either to the left or the right. But since the right seems to have a stunted sense of humor anyway, it looks like Miller's crossing-off of the CNBC list shows there's more risk of being un-funny — and so un-broadcasted — on the right.

Have a listen (MP3) to my own little rant about Miller's fall from funny.

If You Can't Wait for the Dark Side

2005-05-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

In one week, the last Star Wars film opens, and the local theatres are already selling advance tickets for the Big Day. People who attend the opening day of "Revenge of the Sith" run the risk of playing the character Big Honking Geek, of course. Andy Borowitz, the comic who fills many a mailbox with his daily fake news stories, ran an item this week titled "Shocker: Star Wars Fans Have Sex" (Insert derisive laughter here).

All that said, I'd like to have two of those tickets for one week from today, a seat for me and my wife Abby. (Insert sigh of relief on learning your correspondent has what can pass for a normal life.)

Some people can't wait, and others didn't need to. Last week a string of theatres around the US hosted a series of benefit screenings of Sith at the cool price of $500 a ticket. If you were lucky you also got an appearance of one of the film's production crew. It might not have been as thin as the Seinfeld episode where Kramer hosts a Spartacus screening with "the second assistant costumer" as a special guest. But that's a serious jones to shell out 500 beans for a two-week jump on the lines around your multiplex.

I found it far more entertaining just to consume the many bits of the film over the Web. Yesterday the Star Wars Web Site Empire sent me notice of the "End of War" trailer to watch over my Mac (set your bandwidth on stun, trooper), or the "music video" (quotes required) "A Hero Falls." No less than nine TV-ad-length snippets of the movie are online at the starwars.com site. You can probably see 10 minutes of the movie without even putting a toe across the geek line.

But the best representation of the depth of this culture — it's been with us for 28 years now, meaning the kids who saw the first movie when it opened are already older than Natalie Portman — to see how much Star Wars has spawned, head out the fan film frontier. This week at Cannes, Atom Films is screening the slickest of these little five-minute gems, built with "borrowed" seconds from the saga and often given a comic twist.

May the farce be you, young Jedi.

A Glance At Lance's New Gym

2005-05-11T21:51:00.000-05:00

He might not work out much there himself, but Lance Armstrong's name is across the top of the latest 24 Hour Fitness gym to open in Austin. Abby and I are 24-hour members, so I drove a little north of the house to see what a 6-time Tour de France winner can do to motivate regular mokes like me.

It did feel like more fun, looking up at the enormous mural of Lance blasting out of the blocks on the time trials that started under the Eiffel Tower while I cranked up on some late-model cycling machine. There's a serious row of spinning cycles in another room, plus artwork of cyclists jammed tight in a peleton right above the crunch machines. All a better spark than the plain blue walls of the other 24 Hour club in our neighborhood.

Off in the locker room, a Discovery Channel Pro Team jersey and a UT Longhorn t-shirt hang in a glass-doored locker, lit for drama. 24-Hour has Shaq gyms, too. We might as well try to emulate the drive of these heroes, even if we can't expect to achieve their results with garden-variety genes.

Glen Rose, and Dinos, a la Nuke

2005-05-07T13:34:00.000-05:00

Our Texas dulcimer fest has called Glen Rose its home for almost a quarter-century. This is my first trip to this part of the state, a string of little towns that dot the horse pastures and cattle ranches in a rolling part of Texas. Stephenville, maybe the biggest city just a little south of Ft. Worth, lies about an hour down US 67, and the whole area is a hub of horses. I see signs taped onto store doors around Glen Rose for riding lessons, horse training, breeding.

The animal that Glen Rose is best-known for is the dinosaur, though. The local chamber likes to call it The Dinosaur Capitol of Texas, using the “alternate” spelling of capital to suggest we might find a massive building, like all capitols, where the dinos can be found. On the town square a dinosaur footprint, carved out of the nearby limestone, sits next to the town’s museum. Glen Rose claims to be the only city in Somervell County, the second-smallest county in Texas. That’s probably because Pecan Plantation sits 10 miles away in Hood County, and Walnut Springs is 12 miles away in Bosque County. The borders run close here.

That dino track needed a nuclear nudge to get onto the square. The block of rock came out during the creation of the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, which sits about 5 miles from Glen Rose, one of just two Texas nukes on the state’s grid. Driving the hills and valley roads you can see the massive transmission lines running toward the plant. As we check in up in Granbury, 14 miles from Glen Rose, I spot a poster next to the hotel’s front desk: Emergency Evacuation Procedures in case of an accident. It’s worded matter-of-fact like the aircraft emergency cards you see in jet liners, assuring residents that "If evacuation is recommended, stay calm, you'll have plenty of time to leave." My favorite phrase from this “escape the nukes” placard advises folks to roll up their windows in their cars and "If you use your car air conditioning, set it on "inside" or "maximum" so it does not pull in outside air." Somervell County is a peaceful, beautiful place, so naturally Texans would abide a nuclear shadow over its grassy hills.

Granbury manages to sport a harbor, not a bad trick for a city that’s 300 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The Brazos River Authority has dammed up the river to create Lake Granbury. We ate at a floating dockside restaurant. You wouldn’t expect to be in what the chamber calls “the Threshold of the infamous ‘Texas Hill Country’“ and yet feel the restaurant's flooring sway beneath you.

Back in Time to Older Music

2005-05-06T22:18:00.000-05:00

I rode up to Texas horse country today to saddle up in another way, sitting for hours to listen to instruments from an older time. The Lone Star State Dulcimer Society held its 24th Annual Dulcimer Festival in Glen Rose. Two dozen acts played, strumming the strings of mountain dulcimers or tinkling tunes across hammer dulcimers, backed up by fiddles and even a single-string bass, mounting a homey plywood stage in a throwback RV camp, Oakdale Park. (That's Ken Cook, dulcimer builder and one of the festival's main supporters, hammering away.)

They all called it “old time music” for short, with tunes from Ireland, Scotland and the early Middle West of America. But the dulcimer — an instrument with the flexibility of both piano and guitar — can be pressed into more modern compositions, too. We heard James Brown (I Feel Good). The Classic “I Will Fly Away” is followed by Bread’s “If.” The more recent songs ripple with novelty on the dulcimer. The classics ring out with the instrument’s true tenor. (As opposed to the hammer above, this contestant strums a mountain dulcimer, an instrument with the soul of a banjo and the voice of a modest harp.)

Oakdale Park opened its aging arms to a crowd of about 300 performers, families and bemused spectators (I count myself in that narrow group.) Yes, it’s a dale of arching oaks, set across the street from Big Rock Park in the Glen Rose outskirts (if a town of 2,400 can really have outskirts). The park accomodates RV campers and tent-toters, but it’s also flanked on one side with tiny 15x15 one-room cottages named things like Nest, Den, Hut, Pad and Cave. The ample swimming pool was dug in 1925 by excavators using mules, or so goes the legend. Oakdale opened for business in 1960, but it has a feel of the Forties. No alcohol, were reminded religiously, is allowed on the premises. The spirits are steeped from another source here.

Ron Wilcox, my guide and good friend, acted as the Mayor of my Dulcimer-ville for the weekend, steeping us in performance and then steering us to the outer realms of the bigger town, Granbury, where a Days Inn awaited. I scribbled and recorded and photographed and videotaped, like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. A story seems to sing out here.

The Eighties Arrive Again

2005-05-05T20:51:00.000-05:00

No, not the era of Top Gun and Billy Idol. I’m talking about temperatures in our part of Texas. Yesterday in Austin we saw just about the last of our highs in the 70s. (Come to think of it, there were a lot of those kinds of highs in the Seventies. Ba-dum-bump. Thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

April left us with too little rain, but it hasn't kept the lawns and the Indian Paintbrush wildflowers, from growing in climbing temperatures at a healthy clip. We’re all comparing our cutting down here — “I only had to cut the lawn twice in the last three weeks.” But air from over Mexico, and that from the Gulf next to it, are about to overpower any cool fronts that jet through. Our weather service “forecast discussion” now warns of weeks where “Rain chances decrease and hot dry weather will result as a dominating ridge build into the southern plains.”

It's as plain as the blooming lawns that summer sets in by early May, as usual, and it won’t depart until October. Big glasses of iced tea, and livin’ in the AC, help us transplanted Yankees stay cool. Lessons I learned in the Eighties, when I spent my first summers here, astounded by the powerful heat. Today I got in my first long ride since the HCRA, and the last of my pedaling through cool air for the season, down Parmer Lane's broad shoulders and up through Breakaway Park, a "fly-in community" where you can taxi your private plane out of the garage and right onto the Breakaway airstrip.

Spurs' D Ices Out That Hottest Team

2005-05-04T23:39:00.000-05:00

"The hottest team in the NBA" saw its fire doused by defense last night, as the Spurs stifled the Denver Nuggets to end Denver's season. For weeks we heard so much about how Denver was dangerous, had won 11 consecutive games at home since midseason, was 22-1 in the Pepsi Center since they got their new coach, George Karl. The most dangerous team in the playoffs, nobody wants to face them now.

Hey, we saw them beat the Spurs on a Saturday night down in San Antonio. It was one of just three home losses, even if we didn't have Manu and Tim Duncan on the floor. They looked vulnerable.

Then ESPN reported this breathless stat:

George Karl set an NBA record by leading the Nuggets to a 32-8 record after he became head coach in January. Karl's .800 winning percentage was the highest in NBA history by a midseason replacement who coached at least 20 games.

"Blah, blah, blah. Denver got beat in both of its home games in the series. The Spurs scratched them out of the playoffs in four straight losses, jamming up the likes of Carmelo Anthony with penetrating defense. So the Nuggets became the first team in 12 years to post the best second-half NBA record and then lose in the first round of the playoffs.

Coach of that other team, in 1993? George Karl. (That hissing sound you hear is the air escaping that gaudy "Karl for Coach of the Year" balloon. Fleeting glory is built on half a season, as Karl already knows.)

Our heart rates stayed below 140 we watched Karl's season end tonight. Not like that Spurs overtime win on Monday. We didn't get to sleep that night until nearly 2 AM, with the game running long out in the Mountain time zone.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow morning for the weekend's conference semifinal games against Seattle, another run and gun team. (The Spurs want to fill their SBC Center in San Antonio with friendly faces, so Ticketmaster won't process a playoff order if your zip code is further away than Austin. If you're not from around here, you gotta get yours on the street, or from a broker. Few NBA teams limit sales like this, and it really cheesed off the Dallas fans two years ago in the conference finals. Playoff games sell out in Texas. Who needs the out of towners?)

The Spurs are likely to see all three NBA hot shooters on the way to the finals. First Denver, scoring more than 110 points a game at home. Now Seattle, driven by the 3-ball master, Ray Allen, Mr. "Jesus Shuttlesworth" of He Got Game movie fame. The Spurs have their own 3-point shooter. Might have heard of him, a fellow with five title rings: Big Shot Bob Horry.

When the Spurs ground the Sonics, they probably face the flaming fast break of the Suns and Little Stevie Nash. For a spot in the Finals, no less.

Cool defense kills off these torch artists, those who play high-octane ball and not much D. In last night's fourth quarter, the Spurs held Denver to 14 percent shooting. Stifling.

And everybody thought the Spurs would have trouble breathing, up in Denver. Defense makes the air so rare, anywhere.

The Spurs D, which everybody outside of Central Texas calls ugly to watch, comes in so many little clampdowns. Like the offensive rebounding of Nazr Mohammed, who replaced fan favorite Malik Rose in February. Fans were angry then about the trade. But I don't remember many Malik nights in closeout games where he swiped 7 offensive boards. (It's been a tough spring for Malik, who got his two Spurs title rings stolen last week in a burglary at his home in San Antonio.)

We still can't figure why the Knicks traded us "Nazy," but their loss is our defensive gain. Those offensive boards keep the ball out of the hands of these barnburning teams. Defense isn't ugly. It's a cool way to bring another title to one of the NBA's smallest markets.

More Bullets to Dodge in Communication

2005-05-03T13:11:00.000-05:00

After getting a comment from bullets-in-writing advocate BL Ochman about my entry that derided bullets in blog copy, I found a marketing maven who wants to see the bullets disappear like I do. He'd like to see them erased from PowerPoint presentations, too. I'd said that PowerPoint isn't a writing tool, but it's being used like one. Cliff Atkinson, who wrote "Beyond Bullet Points," says over on the MarketingProfs.com site that bullets are the bane of business communication.

On May 12 Atkinson leads a free online seminar at MProfs: "Transform Your PowerPoint Beyond Bullet Points!" In the interview he says film is the medium to mimic if you want to make PowerPoint communicate:

"People have been communicating complex information using projected images and spoken words for more than a century without bullet points — in the form of films. We have a thing or two to learn from filmmakers about how they do that."

Film is a great teacher for writing skills. Ron Shelton, the director and screenwriter who gave us "Bull Durham," has a sign next to his keyboard that says "Don't think. Just write." You can make writing simple without biting those bullets.

A Sweet Finish of Sweat and Tears

2005-05-01T22:34:00.000-05:00

People crossed new thresholds today as they crossed the finish line of the ride. The picture at left includes two first-year riders, Abby (far left) and Elaine (very middle), the kind who make our efforts grow with each year. Our gallop down to that finish felt so fine. Since last year's ride was rained into a single-day event, it had been two years since I had the thrill of riding downhill for the last two miles into Austin, every stroke of the pedal carrying me closer to the cheers of the crowd at the finish line. My finish was even more exciting because Abby was riding 200 yards in front of me, finishing up a complete last leg of the ride that she thought she might have to sag through. While I yapped encouragement at her up the last of the hard hills, she cleaned her plate of courage to grind up the inclines. Angels of volunteers stood at every turn, telling us the finish line was not far, and the top of the hill was close.

The ride can do that for you: Give you the strength you were not sure you had. The hidden power comes from the spirit of supporters all along the road, at the tops of hard hills and long climbs like the one on that final leg, a finish more than six hours away from that hard Sunday morning start. While I was stuggling up the 303 hill again, Abby was recovering from a fall right at the starting line, a tough way to begin a long day of biking in wind and up hills. While she had no road rash, she came home tonight sporting some impressive bruises.

At the first pit stop my friends Ron and Steve joined me in some clowning for the cameras. There's not a one of us who's younger than 48, but we keep after each other on so many miles in training and fun rides that their spirit turns my cranks as much as any power. After yesterday's grueling start, we all felt thrilled to push off into sunny skies with virtually no wind for the first hour or so. I got to power through a 16-mile segment to dash to lunch in the early afternoon, cutting through the leg in a little more than an hour and 10 minutes. Those muscles were sore, sure, but they were also accustomed to responding to the challenge after my 50 miles yesterday. I wanted to catch up to those fellows, and Abby, who'd gotten into the "Dollywood" lunchtime pit before me:

The parking lot on Southwest Parkway couldn't have been more transformed from Saturday morning's rainy scene. The air was warm and the sun shone bright, but the brightest light on that pavement was the beaming smiles of riders and volunteers and family and friends, all waiting to welcome the riders just returning. The Ride is extraordinary among bike events I've ridden: The later you pull in, the bigger the cheers. It's a tribute based on the level of your effort, not the speed of your day. Our mantra has always been "It's a ride, not a race." Sunday's sweet reward showed how deep we hold that belief.

Then the ice water and ice cream flowed, along with the tears of unbridled joy from the first time finishers, and those whose hearts were moved along with them, like mine. Abby and I, the Duo-Tones, finished with our Elvis "Road King" socks on our feet and big grins for the cameras. Every rider got a cool bandana draped around their neck at the finish, along with a big hug from the ride organizers.

After we'd taken off our riding shoes, stretched and removed our helmets at last, we tottered back to the finish line to cheer in the later riders. The last bike that came in, along with the SAG trucks just behind it, touched off an ovation that rocketed off the office faces and pounded back onto our sunburned necks. We didn't feel any pain, the endorphins already shooting through us after the exercise.

Our physical effort astounds us when we take ourselves beyond our ideas of capability, but that work pales to the challenge of living HIV positive or surviving AIDS. Our ride was dotted with "Positive Pedalers" and those SAG angels whose hearts were big enough to help us climb Lance-class hills. It's a marvelous thing to do something so dramatic, scary and fun and have the effort inflated by raising funds and awareness.

Over these two days we flaunt a community of kindness. We'll miss the contact, a sadness that crept over me even as we loaded our camp gear and bikes into our van. I'm glad to have volunteer work to do for the ride in the months to come. I want to rub this feeling deep into my self, so I remember the scent of sweet tears mixed with sweat and burnished by loving smiles.

Many Miles to Run Off the Rain

2005-04-30T21:06:00.000-05:00

We looked at the skies and wanted to cry. The weather guessers had promised us good weather for the weekend's Hill Country Ride for AIDS, but Saturday's first light showed dark clouds and lightning tickled the skies. At least we didn't have three days to worry about the bad weather, like last year's ride. The system appeared so quick the TV stations didn't even have time to update their Web sites. Up in the Panhandle it snowed. Snow anywhere in Texas after March is as rare as an uncured ailment in a faith healer's meeting.

But we took to our bikes after a two-hour delay, a time when our ride director told us their biggest concern was avoiding hypothermia. We added extra layers, donned ponchos and slickers and hoped for clearing skies. (From left that's my friends Ron Wilcox and Steve Hardwick, my gal and me, all trying to pretend it's not hypothermia weather.) Although rainfall for the first three months of the year was above normal, April had been unseasonably dry. It was the 12th-driest April on record, according to the National Weather Service.

Except for April's last day, of course.

Then Texas worked its atmospheric miracle, and by lunch we had brilliant sun, warming temperatures, and rising low water crossings. That kind of turnaround happens often down here as the cold fronts pummel through, leaving postcard skies in their wake. This rider at left was one of the daring ones, taking a turn across the bridge on his saddle instead of walking his bike across and using the sandbags set down at each bridge's edge by our safety crew. It was so slick at one bridge that a SAG motorcycle rider dumped his bike twice in as many crossings.

We made our way toward Krause Springs in Spicewood, Texas, 50 miles of pedaling for our first day. The day featured an impossible hill that I managed to ride up anyway, lifted by the spirits of all those donations -- as well as the knowledge that no matter how hard it hurt, living with AIDS was much harder. Still, my heart rate was above 180 at the top of that monster. I had to stop at the summit and let my beat recede to decent levels. After shortening the ride a little to make up for our stormy delay, the organizers gave us a 100-mile course. It meant we went to bed knowing that we had to crest that hill again, tomorrow in the homeward direction.

This year my Abby rode for the first time. First-time riders are the most special, really, because they face the fearful miles without the experience that they can do this very hard thing. This year I helped lead the team of Ride Leaders, those who weat the Yellow Helmet covers to bring along riders who were building their first success. I was proudest of Abby when she rode into Pit Stop Two today, the last rider in for that leg — because she'd climbed up the hill leading out of the Pedernales River's riverbed. About a 13 percent grade, that one, the kind that makes your car change gears twice as you drive up. She defied gravity, powered by her own sponsors and more than a little prayer.

Lance Armstrong rode up that very same hill earlier that day, according to our safety crew, now in training for his seventh yellow jersey. He was riding faster than any of us amateurs, but his climb was no steeper. The Hill Country is a challenging course to climb.

More important than the climbing was the fundraising we powered. The Ride's 2005 total stood at a record $420,000 tonight when we honored those we'd lost to AIDS. For 10 minutes the names of the missing were read aloud, while the memorial tags we decorated and wore during our riding day served as backdrop for the ceremony. The sounds of the camp along the river were a mix of trickling springs and snoring riders. People dropped off into sleep wearing their ride clothes, too tired to change. For some of us, pedaling another 50 miles tomorrow seemed like a fantasy. But we'd seen a day when the weather showed us a fantastic change, so perhaps it would be possible.

Life in a Town of Liberty and Lobs

2005-04-29T09:26:00.000-05:00

Elton John came to Austin this week to perform in a fundraiser hosted by tennis ace Andy Roddick. Roddick's established a charity foundation four years ago, even though the boy was only 18 at the time. He won $7 million in 2004 alone, and he's lived in Austin for the last several years.

In an AP story about the fundraiser, Elton wouldn't give out any details about his upcoming marriage to his partner of 11 years, David Furnish. But Elton gave our town some dap for being the coolest place to live in all of Texas:

"Austin is my favorite Texas city because it's so green," John said. "It's a fun town. It's a great music town, always has been. If I was going to live in Texas this is where I'd live."

He performed just down the street from the state's legislature, though, whose House approved a constitutional ban against gay marriage. Gay marriages are already illegal under Texas law, but that's apparently not enough of a statement for the august statesmen from places like Sugarland, Pampa and New Braunfels. That House has already voted to prevent gays from being foster parents this spring. I suppose that orphanages and juvenile halls are a better alternative to loving, caring adults. The way I remember it, pondering your parents' sex habits as a child was more repulsive than rotten egg salad. Elton might think Austin is the acme of Texas living, but he's got more sense than to bring his partner anywhere close to such bigotry. We're still working on that liberty thing down here, Elton.

At least we're not trying to work out the bad math in squirrely research studies about foster home abuse. The big lie being told on this issue: "Children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents."

This mistake, based on data from Illinois, made it onto CNN during a debate on the homosexual foster home issues. The Wall Street Journal has a columnist, Carl Balik, who pulled the shaky statistics apart on this big lie. Balik said in his latest Numbers Guy column:

"This required several leaps of logic, some of which I'll discuss later. The biggest is that Dr. Cameron had no data about the makeup of homes in which the Illinois children were abused; indeed, a state DCFS spokeswoman told me the agency doesn't record whether households are same-sex. It's possible that much of what Dr. Cameron calls homosexual abuse occurred in what would be considered heterosexual homes."

Oops. So homosexuals and heterosexuals really have the same makeup, then? We're all so much more alike than different.

Ready for Tomorrow's Tiger

2005-04-28T08:10:00.000-05:00

This blog comes to you through a Macintosh, the computer whose demise has been continuously predicted — much like our errant forecasts noted yesterday — since I started using the Mac in 1987. So many tomorrows have dawned for Mac users since then. The company's stock split this year and it trumped its profit estimates six-fold in the last quarter. Clearly, Apple is selling us things we covet. Tomorrow us Mac lovers can put a Tiger in our tanks, when the latest operating system, code-named Tiger, ships from Amazon.com and elsewhere. (This morning Tiger's No. 2 on the Amazon software best-seller list, right behind Microsoft's Encarta digital encylopedia.)

In a brilliant column on the NY Times Web site, David Pogue details Tiger's stripes. He warns us that reading about operating systems "is about as much fun as a seminar on tax policy." But then he goes on to show us the fun of using Spotlight (shown left), the new search-and-find program inside Tiger that tracks down whatever you're looking for without opening a single folder. Tiger has better security, too, something that should interest the virus-and-spyware-weary Windows users. Somehow, the Mac's new OS can now make your computer too stealthy for bad guys to enslave it in the service of sending spam to others.

Pogue is a treasure for us in the Mac community, but he's genuinely entertaining in his latest outing. Pogue, a former Broadway conductor, wraps up his summary of Tiger's new stripes by putting them down in song, to the beat of "The First Lord's Song" from HMS Pinafore

The rest of the 200 features don't fall into any one visionary category; they're an assortment of tweaks and upgrades that pile up like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan:

The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,

And its "private browsing" mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.

There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;

You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.

You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;

And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.

There's a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,

And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.

Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -

You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.

There's a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,

But it works and doesn't slow you down - and these days, that's enough.

Okay, maybe the geek in me likes tax seminars, though I'm a chronic extension filer. But I believe Apple/Amazon's got my $95 coming their way soon.

Happy Weather Forecast For Us

2005-04-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

This has been a tough springtime to rely on the weatherman, but this afternoon we Hill Country Riders have reason to be hopeful. The National Weather Service puts a discussion of the weather conditions out on its pages for every location. It's written in real meterologist-speak, all capital letters (the kind forecasters were once stuck with on teletyped reports) and some terms not often used on the TV news:

THE COOL NWLY FLOW ALOFT WILL TRANSITION TO A WARMER WESTERLY FLOW FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE WEEK. THIS WILL RESULT IN INCREASING SOUTHERLY WINDS TODAY AND FRIDAY WITH A RETURN OF SHALLOW GULF MOISTURE TONIGHT AHEAD OF THE NEXT FRONTAL SYSTEM LATE FRIDAY. UNFORTUNATELY THE NEXT TROF THAT WILL PUSH A PACIFIC COLD FRONT THRU S TX LATE FRIDAY WILL DO LITTLE IN THE WAY TO GENERATE ANY NEEDED PRECIPITATION AS MOISTURE AGAIN LACKING. FRIDAY LOOKS TO BE VERY WARM WITH THE DRY LINE AHEAD OF THE COLD FRONT AND WILL LIKELY SEE NEAR 90-90S FOR HIGHS MOST AREAS...SIMILAR TO LAST FRIDAY. ANOTHER PLEASANT WEEKEND WITH SLIGHTLY COOLER AND DRIER CONDS. BY EARLY NEXT WEEK...THE LONG RANGE MODELS POINT TO A SHIFT TOWARDS AND MORE ACTIVE WSWLY FLOW ALOFT WHICH COULD RESULT IN DEEPER MOISTURE ALONG WITH MUCH IMPROVED RAIN CHANCES AS A SERIES OF DISTURBANCES MOVE ACROSS NRN MEXICO AND INTO WEST TEXAS. HAVE INCREASE POPS FOR EARLY NEXT WEEK INTO THE MID WEEK AS THE ECMWF AND GFS APPEARS IN FAIR AGREEMENT WITH THIS WETTER UPPER AIR PATTERN.

Translation: Warmer until Friday, but the cold front doesn't contain moisture. Windy, but not much chance of rain. Yahoo!

After last year's damp ride, this could be a spectacular alternative. Reminds me of a call-and-answer I heard on a Hill Country training ride when the skies threatened:

Ride Leader: So what do you do when it rains?

Riders [saddled and ready to pedal their bikes]: You get wet!

Weather is something we all have an opinion about, the subject we all believe we understand. But you read the discussion above and perhaps you'll see there's more to accurate forecasting.

Once upon a time in my life I wanted to be a weatherman. Upon enlisting in the US Army, I considered getting weather training as a job in 1976. The idea got nixed when I learned I had to train at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Too far out in the sticks for me then: north of Geronimo, south of Apache (town names), just a short drive to Oklahoma City. I needed an Army posting with more than one community theatre to play in, anyway. In the job I took at Fort Hood, Texas — just a short drive from Austin — I got only close enough to weatherman skills to use a radio teletype, transmitting troop and vehicle status in all caps, just like those weathermen.

And okay, they're weather-persons. But regardless of their gender, forecasters by their very discription usually try to eye some point in the future. This season it's been so volatile there has been little reason to look even three days ahead. I'll risk it today.

Publishing Before I Perish

2005-04-26T21:16:00.000-05:00

Tonight I met with Mike Austin, my friend who's working on a novel about the US Submarine Corps in WW II. We meet at Borders Espresso Cafe to scratch out writing exercises, a way to pry loose the words to build our novels. Lately I have gained hope my Viral Times will be published. By me, if need be.

It's not "vanity publishing" anymore, either. The NY Times ran a story over the weekend about iUniverse and its "author services," which give one writer real control over content of their book, the advertising, and the media interviews. A traditional publisher is unlikely to give that kind of control to a first-time author.

Novels give us creators the biggest canvas and the widest pallette, even bigger than the movies. For years The Princess Bride was only a fabulous William Goldman novel that he never figured he could get made into a movie. (Goldman's a great screenwriter whose best-known credit might be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) He wrote "Bride" and then had to wait years until Rob Reiner managed to make a great movie out of it. Now we're reducing the waiting time. Such author services need to be supplemented by good editing, but control has begun to tilt toward creators — rather than purveyors — of published work.

Already Proud, But Aware, Too

2005-04-25T15:59:00.000-05:00

My friend Linda Liebich sent me an e-mail today that touts a Navy Cross awarded to a Marine for Iraq-based duty. The forwarded e-mail, also suggests that the mainstream media is not telling such stories of the troops:

The odd fact about the American media in this war is that it's not covering the American military. The most plugged-in nation in the world is receiving virtually no true information about what its warriors are doing.

Like me, Linda thanked God for US soldiers. Why not? I was a US soldier for three years, but not in any duty that would have earned anything as glorious as a Navy Cross. I served three years in the First Cav Division during the Cold War, late 1970s.

Then I took those GI Bill benefits that I earned in uniform at Fort Hood down to Austin, to get a journalism degree.

At UT Austin's J-school I learned to rely on multiple sources of information. The New York Times is an easy target for the right-wing today, but the paper does cover the American military man. On the same day that Linda e-mailed me about that overlooked Navy Cross, the Times ran a big story on Company E, the Marine unit that sustained the highest level of casualties during 2004.

Marines are taking it hard in Iraq. But there's much more to read about field-level experience than some might believe. If the Times is too liberal for you, try Soldiers for the Truth, a Web site with reverence for the military. They're not very happy at SFTT about how those billions for Iraqi freedom are being spent in the field.

But SFTT has run a little venom about humanitarian missions, too. One column there made sport of the relief workers who provided relief for the tsunami victims early this year. In a rebuttal editorial at SFTT, another Navy pilot said the columnist got it wrong — relief is an important mission. If that kind of military mind can show respect for civilians trying to help, maybe those who bristle at any military point of view could learn to respect more militant service. We can hope.

37 Goes Into 48 Just Fine

2005-04-24T21:44:00.000-05:00

We rode the roads in Bell County this morning, a glory tour through wildflowers and wind and cows and creeks, from Salado to Holland to Belton, right past the Stillhouse Hollow lakeside and then back. We stopped at the edge of the lake, then rode across the dam to make our way back to Salado. The 37 miles gave us a long ride which I was dedicated to doing slow, since it's my birthday. The winds made it easy to keep down the pace, pummeling us in the first hour of our 2-hour, 45-minute ride from the east, on the road between Salado and Holland at 16 MPH. The countryside was gorgeous, carpeted with yellow wildflowers on gentle hills, the highway hugged by waving flocks of primroses a-flutter in the insistent breezes.

Holland was cute, a tiny burg we entered on a main highway that became a street with oaks that arched over the road from either side. Later on there was the Summer's Mill creek crossing, built across a fine waterfall of a branch of the Lampasas River. A loose dog chased us away from the Mill's conference center, but he was all bark and didn't cross the yellow line.

Later on in the day Abby and I hosted a birthday party to celebrate No. 48 for me. I ran around the yard with a sparkler like I was 40 years younger, ate a slice of cake our friend Jane had baked from my memory of a boyhood dessert, and dropped into talk and laughter with friends out on our back patio deck and cabana. Too cold to swim today, but we gathered around the pool anyway, watching the grackles and doves take a dip in the little pond in the backyard.

Near the Top of Training Season

2005-04-23T12:12:00.000-05:00

Today we rode the Loop 360 hills for the last time in training season. We crossed the Bee Caves and Davenport Ranch hills, tough but not the challenge of the bad boy at left, waiting for us next weekend on County Road 303. One week from today we'll be clipped in and ready to ride the Hill Country Ride for AIDS, 2005 Edition. We will stand at the start line out on 5113 Southwest Parkway on what I hope will be a clear and cool Saturday morning.

The morning has been otherwise. Last year the rain started just as we pedaled off. Thunderstorms had cancelled the first day of our ride. On that Sunday morning we rode off in a steady drizzle that spattered my glasses and made the ride-out road a sandy, muddy mess. We’ve had lots of rain in Texas this spring, too, but we’ve rescheduled and dodged the drops some mornings.

I’ve already had my success with this ride. In 2003 it was a 139-mile course, and the bike only had 10 speeds. Just because I’ve enjoyed success doesn’t mean I’m not anxious about my latest attempt. I need help from others — my teammate Abby, who’s riding her first Hill Country Ride alongside me, the SAG and pit stop angels, my friends pushing their pedals on their bikes, my sponsors and contributors.

This morning I rode with intermediate riders, the 13-16 MPH folks, as a ride leader. It was the first day I could pedal as hard as I could and still stay with my ride group. What a rush. I finished the 24 miles in 1 hour, 40 minutes. I've never ridden it faster.

That was in spite of a 20MPH headwind coming out of the north, on our way back to the Arboretum duck pond start point. In Austin the wind is often out of the south. It was odd to climb the Bee Caves Hill with the wind at our backs. But I'm always glad to have a tail wind while climbing.

I've got one more long ride, tomorrow with my friends and fellow ride-leaders Ron Wilcox and Steve Hardwick, to celebrate my 48th birthday. Then it's a five-day stretch of rest, to prepare my muscles for that hill on CR 303.

Growing More than Creosote in West Texas

2005-04-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder where all those billions we've sent to Amazon wind up? Not on the bottom line, of course. The company has only put $620 million in profits down on its bottom line in the last two fiscal years against $12 billion in sales. To be fair, those profits are rising. My friend Ron Wilcox asserted last night that Amazon hadn't made a profit yet. That's the general perception, because founder Jeff Bezos ran the company for years at a loss.

Now there's millions of Bezos bucks flying out to West Texas to build a spaceport. From US News & World Report:

Virgin's Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen aren't the only megarich guys with their eyes on the skies. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, another billionaire, has plans to build a research-testing site and spaceport for suborbital vehicles on a recently purchased 165,000-acre ranch near the town of Van Horn, Texas. Bezos has said little publicly about the venture, dubbed Blue Origin, other than that over the next seven years he intends to construct a $30 million, three-person ship that will take off, go suborbital, and land vertically. (Think of a rocket ship in one of those campy 1950s sci-fi flicks.)

Van Horn is so far out in Texas that it's beyond Big Bend. If you've even driven out there, you look around and think you're already on the surface of the moon. There's so much space that a spaceport seems like a natural.

For years Abby and I rode out to Big Bend in our minivan and marvelled at the lack of habitation. The desolation led me to set a big part of my novel Viral Times out there. Open spaces have become more rare in Texas and throughout parts of America. In my book I've imagined that wind power would pump up the region. But space travel would do, too, although it seems many more years away. You can already see those massive wind generators on the ridges in West Texas.

A 165,000-acre ranch isn't that unusual in that part of the state. But its not nearly as common as the creosote bush, which stretches as far as the eye can travel away from the I-10 roadways. There is so much of Larrea tridentata out in West Texas that losing it from rocket engine blasts wouldn't make much of a dent.

A Second Lawn, Just 13 Songs Away

2005-04-21T17:03:00.000-05:00

My rental house in San Marcos has a lawn, too, so today I drove down to what we call "Rio Vista" to mow in another county. In truth, our house on Cheatham is only 13 songs away, more or less, running up and down the Interstate that links Austin with San Antonio and Dallas. I put on my iPod on the car's radio and drive, trying to remain aware of scenery that can disappear once you're driven through it hundreds of times, like I have since last spring when we bought the house.

That ride south of the city once crossed only miles and miles of pastureland, but now the road to Rio Vista is is developing boils of serious commerce. The newest outlet of outdoor superstore Cabela's has roared up near Buda, with its signs now festooned on a massive water tower as well as the exterior of a building big enough to hold a Saturn V rocket. When one of these shopping meccas for the bass-boat and backpacking set rises up, there's usually a low-cost hotel built in its shadow. Cabela's is a destination, apparently a store you can't get enough of in a single day.

The Buda store, like all Cabela outlets, will house a miniature mountain and waterfall:

A 40-foot-high mountain replica, the centerpiece of the store's open showroom, with running waterfalls and streams, a trout pond and trophy animals in re-creations of their distinct habitats. Similar mountains, each called Conservation Mountain, have been built in other Cabela's stores as monuments to wildlife and salutes to the sportsmen and women who support wildlife conservation.

The construction in Buda illustrates the progress these shoulder counties north and south of Austin covet. Hays is still learning from Williamson County how to court commerce, but the Buda sprawl shows the county is learning fast. The highway on- and off-ramps are being beefed up with yards and yards of new concrete. HEB has decided a second store in the area is a high priority, so a new supergrocery is rising on the other side of the Loop 4 interchange. The traffic now jams up at the end of those ramps at sundown, as a line of pickups and SUVs muscles into a town of less than 1,000 residents. Buda was once important to the railroad. Now it's "gonna be somebody," as Eve told Addison DeWitt in the film All About Eve — apparently somebody with something to sell you. The countryside that surrounds that concrete is not dramatic enough to warrant saving.

In the meantime, the lawn at Rio Vista is doing fine, along with the family making a home out of our second house. I treat the ride toward lawn care like a long meditation, time away from the keyboard that can spark ideas.

Write That Drug Story Real — All of It

2005-04-20T19:15:00.000-05:00

I read last week's Hollywood Reporter to learn about Drugstory.org. The full-page ad told us "How to pace your character's dive down the K-Hole." The ad reported that Special K is "springwater laced with puppy tranquilizer," and taking it leads a dance floor party animal down the K-Hole to see "before your eyes, children flattened and pulled apart like soggy bread. This hallucinated hell lasts 24 hours, and so the next morning the victim has no recollection of the ride, the rave, or how they were raped."

Whew. I'm thinking my character is changed for life by something like that. Pacing could be a problem. Better save the K-Hole hell for a key point of the story.

The Drugstory.org site, run by the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, puts writers in touch with experts to explain how drug users live and what their drugs of choice do to them. More touching are the personal tribute Web sites linked inside Drugstory.org, places like the Courage to Speak Foundation, built around the death of a woman's son though a heroin overdose.

The Reporter ad promised first-person accounts of drug use. Even the second-person stories were gripping, like Jo Payne's account of raising her grandchild Colby when his mom died after 20 years of using drugs like meth.

But not everything chronicled comes off the dance floor. One story included prescription pill abuse; another article talked about the problem of getting prescription drugs from outside the US. A Washington Post reporter took note of the US FDA personal-use exemption, revised in 1988 "when AIDS was surging and domestic treatments were scarce. The FDA responded by saying that patients with life-threatening illnesses under a doctor's care could import a few months' worth of medications, even if the drugs were not approved in the United States." Mexican shops now sell prescription drugs at prices more people can afford.

We all know where that's led. Now pharmaceutical companies are working hard to close down the source of cheaper drugs. They even have hired a former Louisiana congressman as president of their 15-company lobby. The congressman got more than $90 grand from drug companies during his last re-election campaign, then took a seat on the committee with jurisdiction over the drug industry. Now he makes $2 million a year as head of the lobby. Apparently there's another kind of hell hole related to a drug story — the tale of how corporate drug profits remain protected by locking the gates against cheaper drugs from offshore.

What's to Become of My Bits?

2005-04-19T15:55:00.000-05:00

Computer users ask this question once they have a relationship with a program. Everything changes in life, everything ends. For some of us it seems just as serious to lose a creative tool, or an engine of their career, as losing a friend.

So when Adobe announced it's buying its rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion, users of both companies' products asked the question above. Macromedia's users of drawing programs like Fireworks expect the Adobe juggernaut — Photoshop, Illustrator and the like — to run roughly over their favored tools. Meanwhile, some of us Adobe customers are looking over our shoulders at one of Macromedia's market successes, Dreamweaver. It looks like that product could overshadow our little GoLive program, Adobe's tool that builds Web pages.

Software can outlast a lot of things we buy today: digital cameras, minivans. I've got suits that're older than some of my software, but I don't keep them because they still fit. I have a big enough closet to house some optimism about the future of my physique. I also have a CD player still spinning the discs after 16 years, an item only slightly less amazing than our 22-year-old fridge. Things that last long are more prized than they used to be, because they're more rare.

Consolidation is the credo in the modern software industry, however, which makes even a fit product another candidate for the dustbin. Buying out your competition is an old business model, but it seems like the software bit business has more buyout fever than any other.

Really, can you imagine your favorite car maker being gobbled up by its competitor, eliminating the brand of car you love? Ford bought Volvo, sure, but it didn't erase the safe models Volvo used to define itself. Adobe bought Macromedia, an event like Black & Decker buying the Craftsman line and then removing half the tools from the Craftsman lineup.

We care because we use software to mimic who we are and how we create. Spend enough hours with GoLive while you create Web pages, or with Dreamweaver, and you struggle to change your tools. One GoLive user wrote me:

"When Dreamweaver first appeared on the scene, I have it a look and found it severely lacking. Since then, I’ve given Dreamweaver another chance to win me over every year or so. Each time, I came away puzzled by the ever-growing marketshare/mindshare of Dreamweaver."

He goes on to describe his latest attempt to use the competiting tool, and how he "hit a wall," adding that "I didn’t get any further with this Dreamweaver experiment than previous times. I’m worried the next time I won’t have any choice."

I worry too, but maybe not as much as those full-time Web developers. More than once in the last two years of cutting Web pages I've grown convinced that something's got to be easier to use than GoLive on my Mac. Comments like the one above don't make me feel so certain, however.

Dreamweaver users see their bigger market share as proof enough of product superiority. A story on a Ziff-Davis site about the merger included a user comment that “Hopefully, Adobe will be smart and recognize the market share of Dreamweaver in addition to realizing what a powerful tool it is for Web developers.”

We Mac users hear this kind of thing a lot. It's popular (see Windows) so it must be good. Nah. It's sometimes just popular. There's a way to escape being outsold. If you build something as well as a BMW, it doesn't matter how much those Fords outsell your car. GoLive, unfortunately, is no BMW. On its best days, maybe a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. (We own one like the model at left, only in red, and just love its look and driving feel. We're also waiting for enough budget to replace its broken convertible top motors, a chronic component in Spyders of 1998 vintage.)

Companies do business to profit and persevere, goals that demand they prune their tools from time to time. Losing our software bits gives us a way to get ready for life's more meaningful changes: the decline in our health, advancing age, and the loss of all that we love, eventually.

Happy Birthday, My Abby-Gal

2005-04-18T10:58:00.000-05:00

My wife Abby celebrates her birthday today. Here she's smiling at the flea market out on Highway 290, while she stocks up on blankets for her new restorative yoga practice. (Details to come soon at her Heartfelt Yoga Web site.) So today Abby has had breakfast in bed, presents still to be unwrapped, a fondue dinner with our friends and family coming up tonight. And sure, a birthday poem from her fella:

At that shiny moment
When you began
so many of us could turn toward
a sweeter chapter of our own story,
know the good part was coming up
over and over again

She's a person who's used her life to make many lives happier, especially mine.

Two Rides, One Day, Both Ways

2005-04-17T18:40:00.000-05:00

The hills that rise east of Austin called me this morning, and I answered without too much of a struggle. Today's Hill Country Ride for AIDS led us around Decker Lake, a part of the Colorado River created when the Lower Colorado River Authority dammed up the river both west and east of the city. Decker flows from Lake Long, which is fed by Town Lake (in downtown). Further upstream are (in order) Lake Austin, Lake Travis, Inks Lake, Lake LBJ, Lake Marble Falls and Lake Buchanan. When you're north of Buchanan you're in bald eagle country.

The baddest hill on the Decker Lake ride lifts out of the Decker Creek watershed. It's one of those double-trouble hills, where you do some serious climbing only to find there's an even bigger hill waiting for you once you get to the crest. Today this was 10th gear work, the easiest in the middle ring. Gears 9-1 live on the little ring, which I was afraid I might need again after using it on the way to back to Dripping Springs a few weeks ago. Didn't need it.

Later in the afternoon I did another ride in another direction, out north along Brushy Creek, one of my favorites. What's not to like? No big hills, pretty scenery, 10 minutes from the house, lots of rest stop possibilities, good mileage. I enjoyed it all with Abby. She's back in the saddle after more than a week off, travelling to Philadelphia and back. She looked good out there on the roads, chirping out "Car Back" over and over to warn me of cars ready to pass us on the two-lane Brushy Creek and Sam Bass Roads. I'm happy to have her back after a week of bachelor living. I'm also glad to get two ride sessions into a single day. That's the kind of pace we'll both need to keep for the HCRA ride: A series of 14-to-19-mile rides with pit stops, stretching and lunch in between rides.

6,000 Miles of Smiles

2005-04-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

Today's training ride put me over the 6,000-mile mark on my cycle odometer. That's a couple of good years' worth of pedaling, accomplished over about 27 months. Not bad for somebody who was a beginner just two springs ago. I began riding back then with my Schwinn Sprint bike, a 15-year-old relic with just 10 speeds, heavy steel wheels and shift levers on the down tube. When I started my riding in February of 2003 I probably had no more than 500 miles on that bike over 15 years of ownership. That bike was made in the days when 10 speeds were the standard. Even on the 139 miles of my first Hill Country Ride, I didn't need all ten speeds. I surely wanted some lower gears, through.

This morning's training ride carried us Hill Country Riders for AIDS around Brushy Creek's watershed in the southern part of Williamson County. It's one of my favorite rides, starting with a long stretch with the wind usually at our backs, then turning onto rural ranch roads with very little traffic. The road names are sometimes evocative of the history of this part of Texas: Sam Bass Road, named after the outlaw gunslinger; Hairy Man Road, named after, well, probably every cedar chopper who carved a ranch out of the mesquite and juniper trees.

Brushy Creek Road is the highlight of this 16 miles, smooth roadway that follows the Creek and crosses it on two new, wide bridges. No low water crossings on today's route. This year's extraordinary rain has pushed up a torrent of wildflowers, though, the Indian Paintbrushes, bluebonnets and winecups all waving in a gentle breeze. I breezed in at the very back of the pack, sweeping riders who felt challenged by the mileage. We're all someplace along that training and riding path.

It felt good to cross the 6K mark, though. I delayed buying my Allez Comp 27 road bike in 2003 until I could be sure I'd enjoy this. Now the riding seems an essential part of who I am. Volunteering for the HCRA gives me a way to give back. I think of this time of year, leading up to our ride at the end of April, as my holiday season, a time to smile while being generous with time and spirit. Over these two-plus years not all those miles have sparked smiles, but most of them have.

Will 1 Percent Matter for Freedom?

2005-04-15T10:13:00.000-05:00

On my birthday next week, April 24, a mega-church in Kentucky will broadcast a show by satellite that will try to makeover injustice with a facelift of freedom. The US Senate Majority Leader is going to take part in Justice Sunday, a show that might reach a million people through the Internet and Christian radio and TV networks. Makeovers are so popular these days. But we ought to leave that entertainment to trashed-out backyards and bungalows. Freedom looks pretty good without the circus makeup of religious fervor on its face.

Everybody has a right to an opinion and the right to express it. The Justice Sunday opinion tries to make civil liberty sound like thievery, and intolerance sound like a birthright. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council trumpets his side's narrow victories in recent elections. Now he hungers to cut the courts off at the knees, too. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

I live in Texas, and I'm well aware of how these "freedoms" look. Like some thugs' idea of freedom to drag a man to his death behind a pickup in a small Texas town, just because the man is black. Or our bike ride in two weeks to raise funds for AIDS charities — money for people who are sick and dying — a ride that needs to keep its route secret until ride day, because people came out to heckle the riders and protest the charity fundraiser.

Freedom means the permission to live a life that doesn't hurt anyone else. It's not a blank check to squash people who have different sexual preferences or beliefs about the right to life, to push them down with the weight of What My God Says Is So.

We're lucky that Justice Sunday has a reach so small. A million people is less than one percent of last year's voters. And face it, this Sabbath Day hate-fest is really not preaching to anybody but their own choir.

The rally hopes to pump up public support for ending the right to filibuster over the appointment of judges. The right has been working for more than 200 years. Now that the right-wing has packed the Senate with a majority, it's ready to remake our courts. This is the "nuclear" option talked about for months now. (That's kind of like the word "nook-kew-lure" we hear from our President. Great picture of W's grandfather at that nuclear link, sleeping on a cot during a 60s filibuster against civil rights. I guess the Bush fruit has fallen far from the tree by now.)

The fallout from this political nuclear blast has a half-life that might extend into half of what's left of my life, and yours too. Bad law is a real tar pit to escape.

Bill Frist, that Senate leader, needs to re-read the separation of church and state articles in the US Consitution, not the bible in the Justice Sunday ads. The constitution's that big document he swore to protect when his constituents gave him his job. If he wants to preach next Sunday, he ought to return to a job serving his God. He shouldn't be able to use that gavel in the ad to beat down the rights of people who don't share his faith or his preferences.

Art to Make a Double Take

2005-04-14T16:41:00.000-05:00

Art, like beauty, can exist in the eye of the beholder, an experience I eyed in a darkened gallery today. Austin hosted Between You and Me, an exhibit of 14 videos that could really prompt some double takes. A woman eats drywall in extreme close up, gnawing like an insect. Fierce dogs bark straight on at a camera. A man meditates to the sound of a washing machine. Microphones are rubbed on faces in close up.

I walked through the exhibit at Arthouse, a contemporary gallery down on Congress and Seventh, then wrote part of a scene inspired by eight minutes of video of a woman blowing bubbles with gum. It was an Artist's Date in the style of The Artist's Way, one way to feed the muse of imagination.

Now I Know What the Bleep

2005-04-12T15:25:00.000-05:00

My friend Laurie screened "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" for me today, and I had an out-of-consciousness experience. My friend Ron, a dedicated Buddhist, raved about the movie when it was in theatres last fall. The film broke into double-digit millions during its theatrical run, extraordinary for a documentary. The Washington Post said the picture might have even more buzz as a DVD:

When the DVD of "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" hit the market [in mid-March], it did so after earning more than $10 million in theaters over the past year and a half and trailing only "The Incredibles" among preorders on Amazon.com.

So Amazon got my $20.99 today, because the movie is deep with ideas about what we think of as reality. Too many to recount here, but my favorite was this one:

"I take a few minutes in the morning before I get up to create my day in my mind. I infect the Quantum field with these thoughts. Then I see how my world can show me a sign today that it's paid attention to any one of the things I created, and bring them to me in a way I won't expect — so I'm surprised, and have no doubt next time I can create my day."

Laurie, Larisa and I spent three hours watching the 107-minute movie, rewinding to hear things again and talking about it. Some call it pop science, others propaganda as pointed as Farenheit 911. But any movie that can combine dance-hall favorite "Zombie Nation" with a Polish wedding has got to be worth a look. Quantum physics can really rock, and rock your world.

Double Ws in Double Overtime

2005-04-10T23:12:00.000-05:00

Double overtime victory.

Twice, in two consecutive nights.

On the road, no less.

It's never been done in the NBA before tonight. But my Spurs pulled off the back-to-back sweep against the hottest team in the league. They did it without All-Star Tim Duncan, too.

It's the most hopeful weekend us Spurs fans have enjoyed in quite awhile. Not like the Saturday night in San Antonio with the hot Denver Nuggets handed the Spurs their third home loss of the season. (And last home loss of the year, I hope. Next Saturday will tell that tale, against the Spurs' possible first-round playoff opponents, the Memphis Grizzlies.)

Maybe what was sweetest about these two overtime wins on the road was the play of one key veteran on the floor, Robert Horry. He's had a lot of important shots late in games during the past. But this weekend he made his first two late-game three-balls that mattered to the Spurs, a team he joined in 2003 after leaving the Lakers. Big Shot Bob, as he's called, sank a three-pointer to send the game into OT tonight. The Spurs then beat the Warriors, who'd won eight straight, after 10 more minutes. Last night Horry sank the three-pointer in the second overtime to win the game in the Staples Center against the Clippers.

Maybe last night he felt some comfort in shooting at Staples, where he won his fifth title ring with the Lakers.

The road wins have been tough for the Spurs this year. Without these overtime victories this weekend, the Spurs would only be a .500 team away from home.

Horry is getting his shots because Duncan has been hurt. With our big man coming back this week, the Spurs might have found the handle on putting the ball in the hoop. When a guy like Horry, with five championship rings, starts finding his shooting rhythm, the future looks brighter, even in the dark of the Texas night.

Spurs beat writer Johnny Ludden of the San Antonio Express-News gave Horry's heroics a flourish:

With one more ankle having given way and their season poised to take another turn for the worse as Sunday morning closed hard on Saturday night, the Spurs put the ball in the hands of Manu Ginobili and let him go to work.

When that wasn’t enough, they turned to Big Shot Bob.
And Big Block Bob.

Robert Horry, whose late-game heroics have made him a favorite of the locals here, buried a 3-pointer with 22.2 seconds left then stuffed Mikki Moore at the rim just before the final buzzer as the Spurs outlasted the Los Angeles Clippers 125-124 in double overtime at Staples Center.

“We all know he can hit those kind of shots, but the defensive play he made was unbelievable,” Ginobili said. “He gave us the win.”

Now I can get some rest. Two overtimes in two nights from the West Coast kept me wide awake in the wee hours, hunched over my radio listening to Bill Schoening's masterful call on WOAI. Nothing like double-overtime to get your heart rate up. Here come the playoffs.

Round That Mountain

2005-04-09T18:39:00.000-05:00

We made our way across Round Mountain in Travis County this morning, our last long ride of the training season for the Hill Country Ride for AIDS. Today I convened the ride, making a little speech off the back of a pickup truck bed. As I climbed up the bed I joked, "When you're as short as I am, you get used to standing on top of things to be heard."

It was a good turnout, so nearly 100 riders had already pedalled off by the time I'd gotten on the saddle. I led from the rear, sweeping the sagging riders, answering my cell phone as riders and SAG drivers called for help. I helped fix a flat with Ron Wilcox, more field change experience. We had to make up the route along the way after a detour kept us from crossing a railroad track at the appointed location. Improvising, a Walgreens drug store took the place of a more familiar gas station pit stop. Round Mountain is beautiful but really rural, so bathroom options become only bushes for nearly 15 miles of the 43-plus we rode today.

The roads in this part of the Hill Country sport lots of gravel, the kind of soft spots that can lead to spills and road rash afterward. Jacob was nursing along a fresh rash on an elbow as he worked to finish the course. I still haven't spilled that bad in nearly 6,000 miles, but a crash is a part of everybody's ride, given enough miles. Jacob showed great grit in carrying grit around on that elbow all morning.

We had to cross back into Williamson County before we spotted the wildflowers in any abundance. A sharp south wind in the teens pushed down our pace, especially the last six miles back to Brushy Creek. But I felt strong and able today. Didn't need to get into my smallest front chain ring at all, not like last week out in Dripping Springs. Felt good enough to come home and mow a couple of lawns.

LP Laughter for a Song

2005-04-08T13:50:00.000-05:00

My brother Bob sent me a laugh track today from the past, a cut from the Allan Sherman comedy LP "My Son, The Celebrity." Sherman is part of our family's past, a relic of my dad's love of comedians. Everybody loves comics, I suppose. But when you wrestle with demons like dad did, laughing out loud must have provided an exquisite release.

Sherman was a celebrity for about seven years, starting with a 1962 album that JFK allegedly loved. Sherman couldn't quite manage 50 years on earth before he died of emphysema. Must have smoked like a chimney, common behavior for funny men of the 50s and 60s. His best known song was Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" done to the tune of "Dance of the Hours."

Bob's track came to me from Rhapsody, an online music service that competes with Apple's iTunes but denies Mac users any chance of using it. (Yeah, go figure out that business model.) You can stream Rhapsody's music or pay by the tune to burn it (99 cents). There's another option (ahem) where you capture the stream in a file on your computer for no extra charge, then make something you can burn yourself. I don't know if Allan's heirs would mind so much. Comic lyrics like these below, set to the tune "Alouette", surely must have a finite earning potential:

Al 'n' Yetta love to watch Loretta
When she enters through her fancy door.
They just love The Real McCoys,
Walter Cronkite and The Bowery Boys.

If you're younger than 30, you probably don't get any of those references except Walter. That's the upside of getting old: your hit rate on jokes gets higher all the time.

Bob sent me his MP3 file through yousendit.com, a file transfer holding service. If your mail service chokes on a big file, they can pass it along for you. They provide the gigabytes of disk, you provide the media files, you see a few ads along the way. Free, right? So much on the Internet is free, or appears to be. Or next to free, like the pennies-a-track songs on Russian site allofmp3.com. (Look for the "English" link on the top left if it pops up with Cyrillic letters). Those rascally Russians, always busting the capitalists' chops.

A Night in AAA-Minor

2005-04-07T23:51:00.000-05:00

Tonight the batters' lightning didn't strike for the Astros' farm team like it did for the big league club yesterday. The Round Rock Express launched their first season in Triple-A ball, that level of launch and landing pad for major leaguers coming up or falling back. Minor-league baseball has been in the Austin area since 2000 at the fine Dell Diamond ballpark at left, but this is the first year we get to watch the prospects and players on the way to the Show, or hoping to get a leg back up.

The Express outfield actually fielded more major-league seasons of experience tonight than the Astros started yesterday in their outfield. That would indicate these guys might be on their way down, rather than up. The player introductions, which seemed to go on forever, included plenty of details about which major-league clubs each Express player had played on during seasons past. The local paper noted a typical example of an up-again, down-again player, Trenidad Hubbard:

The oldest player on the team, Hubbard was drafted by Houston in 1986, when teammate Taylor Buchholz was 4. Hubbard has played for 17 minor-league teams, six major-league teams, and one Mexican team. The center fielder showed he's still got it; in Round Rock's exhibition against Houston, he threw out Willy Taveras at home plate.

The movie Bull Durham is the best film to describe life in the minors, where people like the Durham Bulls' Crash Davis have "been to the Show" before returning to the bushes, still hoping to get back. But you have to hustle to get to the show. If you don't you could get an earful like this (click on the console to play the clip):

We sat, Abby and I, and Ron Wilcox and his wife Sue, along the first base-side, just like at the Astros game. But our $11 tickets got us a hundred feet closer to the action on the field. Triple-A is the best value in baseball: Major-league talent at minor-league prices. Everybody on the field is just one phone call away from the big bucks of the big leagues. Or a spiral down, of course. One Express worker grinned when we talked about the AAA upgrade the team has gotten. "Yeah," she said, "this year we don't have to sell them on the AA-level player: 'No drunks coming down from the majors, folks. Just kids moving up.' "

Tonight the game began like the Astros's win did yesterday, becoming a 1-0 squeaker that Round Rock led after five innings. The Express' Ezequiel Astacio had allowed only three base runners, but in the sixth he collapsed, giving up a homer, a double and two singles that were all hit at the right times in the right places. Omaha's Royals batted around and the Express lost its sixth straight home opener. (Last year's Double-A team, relocated as the Corpus Christi Hooks, did no better, losing to a walkoff homer down in San Antonio.) The Express had its chances, but couldn't put the hits together.

The Austin area might be honing its taste for baseball. The facility is first-rate, as good or better than lots of major league parks, but on a smaller scale. (Hey, Minute Maid Park in Houston didn't even have cup holders for its first three seasons. It's not about the baseball, but the beverages!) But tonight's opener only drew 9,620 -- the Dell Diamond holds more than 11,000 -- and lots of those seats were empty after the pitching meltdown. The Express is going to a run-challenged team this year, by the scouts' accounts. They managed eight hits but only the one run. Like the Spurs, they have to survive on their defense.

A Major League Day

2005-04-06T22:33:00.000-05:00

I launched my MLB season today from the first base-side seats at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Great game, really worth the $41 the Astros wanted for a rematch with their postseason nemesis, the Cardinals. The Cards had just kept the Astros out of the World Series last fall, so the rematch this spring was all about who had improved more. Andy Pettitte was making his first start on the mound after last summer's arm surgery, so hopes were high in the park with the roof open on a stunning spring afternoon. It's April in Texas, so the moist Gulf air hasn't made Houston the dismal summer swamp it always becomes.

Pettitte — the first pitcher since Babe Ruth to post a winning record in every one of his 10 seasons — had a rough 2004. The trouble began last year on Pettitte's very first National League at bat. The righthander had always been an American League pitcher up to last year, so he only had 28 at-bats over his first nine seasons. He didn't even bat at all in 1995, 1996 or 1997. That's what the Designated Hitter is for. Feh, American League ball.

In this National League park last year, Pettitte tore a muscle in his pitching arm during his first plate appearance. He wasn't right for the rest of that year, managing only a 6-4 record before he went under the knife in August. Today he looked ready to repay the promise Houston paid for with an $8.5 million contract. 71 pitches, 47 strikes, 3 strikeouts. Only one home run marred a low-speed, high control day. Walked none. Bagwell and Biggio, Houston's redoubtable Bs, combined to give Pettitte a run to start with. He left after six strong innings with the game tied 1-1. Into the eighth, a 1-1 tie. Shades of 1968 baseball, a real throwback.

Then the Cardinals bullpen blew up and surrendered three runs in the bottom of the eighth. Houston touched up Julian Tavarez, who wears the Dirtiest Cap in the Major Leagues. The right-hand side of the bill is a high-funk area by mid-April, because the man grabs that bill between every pitch. Some say there's been more than sweat on that bill. Toss in the high emotion Tavarez brings to his job — he broke his hand in a fit during the 2004 NL Championship series after giving up a homer to an Astros slugger — and the Astros fans were delerious with joy as their team sent him to the showers.

Then Houston's lights-out reliever, Brad Lidge, came on to put the Cardinal batters in their place. Ledge set the place on edge when he walked the first batter, then set down the side in just 10 pitches. Houston entered the win column for the first time in 2005, tied with the Cardinals' record at 1-1. All of this put my Cincinnatti Reds into first place with a 2-0 record. A short stay for the Reds, I suspect. But April baseball is all about promise. Pettitte delivered on his, even if he didn't have his speed up yet. At times the pitch display reported things like "82 MPH Fastball," as if such a thing existed.

Pulitzers Prized from the Past

2005-04-05T17:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the 2005 Pulitzer winners were announced, and the experts at Poynter were only surprised by a few. Hardly anyone was surprised because a group of judges leaked the results, according to Poynter's report.

This year featured another small-market feel-good winner in Investigative Reporting, the prize which shows the kind of "All the President's Men" moxie. Last year the paper in my birthplace, the Toledo Blade, won in Investigative for an expose on the Tiger Force. This year's winner was an even smaller paper, the Willamette Week, a weekly in Portland, Ore. that reported the state's governor had molested his 14-year-old babysitter almost 30 years ago.

Both papers who have won this award since 2004 mined the past. It seems to be a compelling playground for Pulitzer winners. The Blade's series also focused on misdeeds committed more than three decades ago. The Willamette Week won against The New York Times, revealing that thousands of vulnerable American soldiers were exploited by some insurance companies, investment firms and lenders, and The Des Moines Register for an expose of injustice in the handling of traffic tickets by public officials.

In my novel I've got a Pulitzer winner who uncovers misdeeds in camps that house plague victims, 20 years from now. I can only hope that by then the bar for investigative impact rises above traffic tickets and babysitters. The bigger papers seem to be reaching for current day misdeeds.

The literature winner Marilynne Robinson won for her second novel, Gilead, "a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part." Abolition, the Civil War and spirit mixed together across generations. Another reach toward the past.

In Drama, the fellow who wrote the Moonstruck screenplay and won an Oscar for it nabbed a Pulitzer for his latest play. John Patrick Shanley won for "Doubt." But it too is set in the past, 1964.

Half-Mast for a Pope

2005-04-04T21:11:00.000-05:00

Today's 14-MPH winds snapped flags to attention out on Parmer Lane, the route I cycle with Ron Wilcox in the evenings for HCRA training. I was surprised to see that the flag stood at half-mast, in respect for the Pope who'd died on Saturday.

Here's a man beloved by millions, but well outside of being a head of state. He is the Church, which my country has aimed to keep separate from the State.

I say that as a former constituent of John Paul's. I was reared Catholic in Toledo, Ohio. Baptized at the tiny wooden church on Summit Street in Point Place (below) just a few miles south of the Michigan state line. Just north of that line our great-grandfather set up housekeeping after he'd left his priesthood and married his housekeeper. That's a picture of Father Joseph, who immigrated across the Atlantic from Alsace-Loraine, near the French-German border. He spawned a doctor, who fathered my dad, an engineer. We grew up Catholic because of dad's family, which included his cousin Father Paul, and another cousin Pat, who'd tried the seminary and wound up teaching Latin at Catholic high schools, including mine, Central Catholic.

By the time my dad died the Catholic church played no role in our lives. I'd been an altar boy in the 60s, but there was too much authority in a 1900-year-old institution for a teenaged boy. My father's funeral didn't even take place in a Catholic church. His death was marked at a Protestant church — that's what us Sixties Catholics always called the other side of the spiritual fence — in Point Place, a United Church of Christ where my mom and sister Tina had found their spirits lifted up. (Tina's still key to the congregation; she runs the church's youth group.) The only flag on my father's funeral day was folded into the traditional triangle for the fallen Catholic who'd served in the Navy.

I called up my father's resentment of the church for an instant when I saw that flag on Parmer Lane. Pope John Paul took office the same year dad died, 1978, and the pontiff served the third-longest term of any pope. Some have celebrated him as a man for modern times, a former actor, philosopher, scholar, poet, and author, according to another Catholic's column at Poynter.org. But John Paul hasn't changed much about the Catholic church for women like Tina or my mom. Their reproductive rights remain in limbo, I suppose, outdated thinking that enables the violence at American reproductive clinics. Catholics Against Kerry probably helped Bush win another term. Paul, and the 113 Cardinals he appointed, had a hand in that. (Catholics Against Kerry has closed its Web site. Mission accomplished, as our president would say.)

So it's not a surprise that the leader of one of the biggest slices of the US population — 67 million Catholics, in a Catholic News tally — gets the half-mast treatment alongside the highway. The next pope probably doesn't have much chance of being a man who will change the rights of women. My Aunt Lottie's fortune from a Toledo millinery business and Depression-era stock went to John Paul's Church. Ultimately the proceeds from selling our family's lakefront cottage went there, too. It might have taken the Greatest Generation women in my family to unfurl respect like that.

New Kids on an Old Trail

2005-04-03T18:59:00.000-05:00

Today I rode the roads between Dripping Springs and Johnson City, a pair of archetypical Hill Country Towns. This HCRA training ride is one of my favorites, even though it’s among the hardest rides of the spring. We started in Dripping Springs at the administration building just off US 290, but crossed over to Country Road 190, known to the locals as Creek Road because it follows Onion Creek. This stretch is a microcosm of ranch life in Texas, dotted with a sheep farm, stands of cattle and miles and miles of goats.

We rode out on a Sunday morning that would include wind as a major character, mostly blowing from the south. This county road is sheltered from the winds by the ridge that runs down to the creek, though, and the course flows mostly downhill for the first four miles. We crossed the creek twice before riding up alongside the goat ranch, where a mother goat — that’s a doe — had just finished delivering her two kids for the year. Most does give birth in the spring, and it’s an economical arrangement: Does have two teats, instead of the four we see on cows.

The tiny kids were striving toward those teats, then pausing to be licked clean by their mother. Ellen, one of our ride leader co-chairs, had taken her camera along and got this great photo:

The ride’s hard work, 54 miles of it, presented itself almost right after the happy delivery. Abby pulled off the road with a flat just past the Henly volunteer fire station, so I got more practice changing tires. Then we both powered down US 290 for a mile or so, cars whizzing past our shoulders on a highway that didn’t have much shoulder. We turned up FM 3232, starting the long roll down the hill that leads to more work climbing out of the beds of creeks : Flat, Miller, Rough Hollow (which left me feeling both, after I’d crossed both going out and coming back.)

I lost Abby to the SAG truck after 13 miles on the ride. She’d done a great 20-miler the day before at the Rosedale Ride. Riding back-to-back days is part of our training, practice that can wear you out your first time. She pitched in on SAG duty for the rest of the morning and afternoon, dispensing peanut butter Clif bars and her usual, ample complement of good cheer.

I pulled into the admin parking lot after 2, a full five hours-plus on our hilliest training terrain. I had done well in hard winds on the return, avoided sunburn, encouraged other riders in a stab at some leadership. This was the first time for Abby on this trail, a road which now feels like an old friend to me. But this was the first bike ride where I saw a newborn alongside the road. In the Hill Country, lots of things bloom in the spring.

Dodging Bullets in Writing

2005-04-02T20:33:00.000-06:00

Please, how about fewer bullets in our communications, okay? I can accept the fact that Microsoft's PowerPoint serves as a writing tool for a lot of business people. But there's something wrong with thinking that an outliner can lay out ideas with the efficiency, elegance and economy of a good sentence.

Amid a little good advice on writing blog entries, B.L. Ochman gives us this misguided gem:

"Use bullets whenever you can."

Puh-leeze.
Has good writing become an anathema to the Playstation generation? Ochman tells us in a breathless Web page that "The Internet has rendered traditional made-for-print press releases obsolete." Goes on to say that editors won't read a press release written by someone who's learned their skills since 1996. That you should forget what you've learned about business writing if you took a degree before 1990.

Wow, can you really teach me how to write like that? I'm not in my 30s anymore, and I don't watch reality TV — which might be the inspiration for Ochman's "Reality PR." (Oops, forgot to put the trademark symbol next to it. Who knows who might want to borrow that catchy phrase.)

Visit Ochman's own blog and count the number of bullets in her blog entries. You won't even need one finger to tally them all.

Writing is writing, and TV is TV. Try not to mix them up. Don't keel-haul the English language with the sloth that trades good sentences for fragments. Say what you mean with the least number of words. Branch to the right with verbs at the front of sentences. For a genuine primer on writing, check out Poynter Online's series of columns by Roy Peter Clark. He wrote "Fifty Writing Tools," and the only bullets in that great series are the list of tools that close out each column. Bite the bullet. Write a sentence whenever you can.

"I Do" with Pineapple and BBQ

2005-04-01T23:09:00.000-06:00

Today Abby and I saw our friend Stan Pasquale get married for the first time at age 56. He grew up in Hawaii and relocated to Texas years ago, working for a software company that was part of my beat on the HP Chronicle. That was back in the 1980s, so long ago that everybody was stunned that Stan would be tying the knot for the first time after all those years. The wedding date — April Fool's Day — just made it even more interesting.

Stan got married at White River Studios, the movie and entertainment facility our friends own out on the Blanco River. He and his bride Coreen stood in front of tiki torches with the sunset and the river behind them to exchange vows. Stan waited a long time for this — he's uncle to a young woman he helped raise for several teen-aged years, a woman at least in her 20s when she stood up to act as mistress of ceremonies at the reception. When he finally rose at the end of a string of speeches delivered from the long dais at the head of the room, Stan got misty-eyed with the happiness he pledged to his wife. She assured us all she "would take good care of Stan."

The lovely thing about weddings is that they can bring tears to all of our eyes. We get swept away by the memory of our own happy day, when love was full of the promise it will take years to realize.

The reception featured pineapple carried on the plane from the fields in Hawaii by Stan's family, as well as brisket cooked right at the Studios, a nine-hour labor of love. We drove into the same Hill Country we will be riding on Sunday. The studios rest at the bottom of a huge hill I managed to climb in 2003 on my first Hill Country Ride for AIDS. It's wildflower season in Texas, a bumper crop from what I spied alongside the roads on the way out. You never can tell when love will bloom here, either.

First Time This Year for Fireoak

2005-03-31T20:45:00.000-06:00

Today I turned my bike's wheel toward one of the neighborhood's bigger hills, Fireoak. In just a four-tenths of a mile, the road first drops by 60 feet and then retakes every foot back up, plus a few more. The ends of the road make for steep climbing, but I managed to stay out of the smallest front chain ring, the kind of bravado some cyclists trade after a hard hill. I've heard my friend Ron calling out "No granny, no granny" while climbing up a steep hill in Burnet County, meaning he was trying to stay out of the little ring that leads to the easiest "granny" gear. (He managed it, but I didn't on that day.) Fireoak reminds me today of the kind I will need to get accustomed to along that Burnet County Road 303, the hardest stretch of this year's ride. One month from today, I'll be done with that stretch.

I'm making an 87-mile effort over three days this week, with 10 today, 24 on the Rosedale Ride on Saturday, and then the 53 of Dripping Springs. 87 miles in three days is not 120 in two, but it's getting closer.

Maybe he's the right guy for HP's trousers

2005-03-30T21:02:00.000-06:00

I just finished up my early report on HP's new CEO, Mark Hurd, for the 3000 NewsWire. He looks like a much better fit for the company than his rock-star predecessor, Carly Fiorina. It was a hoary marriage between HP, the reticient gentleman of the Silicon Valley, and Fiorina; nothing could illustrate that better than the board's selection of a successor. Hurd has worked for NCR, his only employer, for 25 years, and lives in Dayton. Few things could be more vanilla than a 118-year-old business machine company or its headquarters city which grew up in the shadow of Cincinnatti. (The town does sport a crackerjack baseball writer in Hall of Famer Hal McCoy, still knocking out knockout columns even though he can hardly see anymore.) I know a lot about that kind of industrial Ohio, since I grew up in another town on the I-75 corridor, Toledo. Glass capital of the world, you know, and then there's those scales...

Hurd took his degree from Baylor, which might be the opposite end of the universe from Carly's Stanford alma mater. (For a fabulous novel about the Baylor and Waco, Texas culture, check out Greg Garrett's novel "Cycling." Willie Nelson tried a year at the Baptist college and fled.) Hurd's kids attend public schools alongside the children of people Hurd had to lay off to lift NCR out of a sea of red ink. Carly doesn't have kids and concocted a merger that left thousands jobless, all while she lived behind a security gate and travelled with bodyguards. (In a 2003 radio interview Carly noted that thank goodness, her bodyguards weren't the kind that "pack heat.") Kids in class with schoolmates whose parents were laid off -- bodyguards and gates. That's a wide difference in accountability.

How glad is HP to be rid of Carly? In its "Hurd's hired" press release the company didn't even mention Fiorina, noting that Hurd is replacing interim CEO Bob Wayman. It's a good bet that Hurd won't be tempted to take to a stage alongside Gwen Stefani like Carly did anytime soon. That hubris spawned a top-drawer parody site of the HP Carly era. Hurd might be poked fun at because he isn't flashy, but his career and demeanor at today's press conference bears a striking resemblence to the archtypical HP executive, like Lew Platt, or Bill Hewlett himself. One report at Computerworld described NCR as collegial as HP. The times I've been to HP's HQ have felt like campus visits to me.

Business analysts like writers at The Motley Fool are calling Hurd's appointment brilliant, which also seems to cast aspersions on his predecessor. Not that she made that difficult; there's a wickedly funny parody of Carly's post-firing diary, a la Bridget Jones, on the Fool's Web site. My analysis is that Hurd will be able to return HP to the profit machine it was during the first 15 years I covered the company. NCR is about the size now that HP was when I started reporting on it in 1984. That Baylor Bear should enjoy his honeymoon, but I think he won't be so tempted to knock out the walls of his new home in computing the way Carly did.

Hurd might let some HP customers forgive the company for quitting its legendary legacy business, the HP 3000. Many held out hope when Carly arrived in 1999 that HP would treat the computer as more than a withered stepchild. That certainly didn't turn out to be the case. This time the CEO arrives with a healthy appetite for vanilla, a flavor easy to attribute to the 3000. HP just isn't a miniskirt-and-fishnet kind of company, deep in its soul. Maybe now it can put its pants on one leg at a time, instead of trying to merge itself into better business. It might be safe to start calling the company Hewlett-Packard once more. Perhaps Hurd can restore those words to the company's logo. There's been enough "invent" on HP's underbelly to last another 66 years.

There goes the neighborhood

2005-03-29T14:16:00.000-06:00

We enjoy a lively symphony of birds every morning in our Northwest Austin neighborhood. Barrington Oaks bristles with trees, platforms where a cast of birds from morning doves to cardinals salute the day. But this spring the grackles, nature's boorish tourists, are taking over the airwaves. The grackles pose a problem in suburban environments; I watch them muscle out the other ground-feeding birds outside my office window. Even the blue jays, not a retiring bird, are no match for the grackles' hubris. Cornell's Ornithology department agrees with my low estimation of the grackle song: "The brief, unmusical song is often described as sounding something like a rusty gate." If it seems like there's more grackles in your neighborhood too, well, it's because Cornell says the bird has become one of the most abundant breeding birds in North America.

But you can't order up birds like those free elm trees from TreeFolks that we planted last fall . When the grackles find your neighborhood, the songbirds become a minority, at least to my ears. This is a quiet place, our neighborhood, and so I know there's lots more noise outside other offices. But then there's the comic relief of the new dogs next door, a pair of yappers whose barking passes for a big chunk of their personality. They must be set on a hair trigger, because any nearby siren now sets off a chorus of howling, picked up by most of the other hounds in the hood. Animals domestic and wild are talking it up around here.

Made Up Miles on a Blustery Easter

2005-03-27T17:10:00.000-06:00

It might not have been the most religious way to spend an Easter Morning. But Ron W. and I felt the spirit of the holy chain under our seats when we pounded pedals through a 20 MPH wind, a real norther. We got shut out of our "Georgetown Breakfast Club" training ride earlier this month. So when the skies dried up we headed for the Williamson County seat. We didn't have pancakes at the Monument Cafe. Sundays can be a little too leisurely at that diner for bike riders. The Breakfast Club is the only training ride on the Hill Country Ride that features a meal in the middle. Ron and I settled for a couple of budget tacos and some vending machine cappucino at a little strip-mall eatery, just inside Georgetown's city limits.

It's not easy to ride 19 miles in Texas on a Sunday and not pass a church driveway, but we almost managed it, until we hit the strip mall. The Church of the Rock was in full session. We thanked the Buddha and our gods for catching our breath, then headed back. The wind whipped us along, even carrying us up the shorter hills, after it had laughed in our faces on the northward route. We pedalled right back because I had an afternoon invite to Fonda San Miguel, where for $35 and a couple of hours' wait you could eat some of the best interior Mexican cuisine in Austin. A brunch that was Mucho Gusto, to be sure.

Missing Our Miles

2005-03-26T10:51:00.000-06:00

Rain! It’s gotten in the way of our training this season for the Hill Country Ride. Once more, we had to cancel a long ride out in the Hill Country — just a few miles off the course of this year’s ride — because of a thunderstorm watch today.

The Dripping Springs ride route that got away today. Only four roads, but a dozen hills among the 53 miles.

The Dripping Springs-to-Johnson City ride is way out in the country. Some parts of the route don’t have cell phone services, kind of a risk in case a rider goes down in a crash. And that kind of crash can happen, even to an experienced cyclist. A few weeks back one fellow reached down for his water bottle, took his eyes away from the road for a moment, and ran off the pavement. Broken hip, required surgery.

Today’s course would have been fun in the right weather. We might do the 53 miles later on, but it will have to be rescheduled soon. The ride starts five weeks from today. Tomorrow my wife Abby and me and my friend Ron Wilcox will try to make up for the missing miles by riding to Georgetown and back, about 44 miles altogether. It's called the Georgetown Breakfast Club Ride because it can include a stop at the Monument Cafe for pancakes en route. Last time we tried to ride it, we got rained out.

Maybe the next time I'm here, I'll be wearing my bike jersey. From the right end and working counterclockwise, that's Fred, Abby, me, Leo, Phillip, John and Ellen on the other end.

Tomorrow's weather prediction is for 16 MPH winds with temperatures in the 50s. Brisk for a Texas springtime. Even through it's late March, I'll be wearing the full-fingered riding gloves again.

Easy Riders Today

2005-03-23T15:40:00.000-06:00

Abby and I rode the neighborhood's easy roads today, just enjoying the sun and the wind and being on the saddle. It can't all be about heart rate monitors and average miles per hour on the cycling computer. Sometimes it's got to be about coasting downhill and saying "Whee!"

But I do have 19 miles on the week so far. At least another ride, too, on Friday, before Saturday's climbing in the Hill Country.

We coasted past a couple of grade schools, just ready to let the kids out. Tomorrow afternoon they'll say "Whee!" when they get out for a four-day "Spring Holiday" weekend. Yeah, spring holiday, something a bit more even-handed than saying "Easter" on the school calendar.

I don't begrudge the kids a minute of it. When I was in grade school we had two holidays in February to celebrate Washington and Lincoln. Now it's Presidents' Day, just one.

Talking about writing in the warm sun

2005-03-23T15:00:00.000-06:00

My writer friends Laurie and Larisa sat with me in the bright sunshine this morning, sipping coffees at Barnes and Noble and talking about our writing. Larisa brought a chapter from her novel, "The Gender Game," for us to workshop, and Laurie brought wisdom from the mouth of Richard Ford, whose career includes the first book to win both a Pulitzer and a Pen/Faulkner Award. (The link comes from Powell's, the great independent bookstore in Portland that covers a full city block with four floors of books new and used.) Ford talked at Texas State yesterday, but the Q&A afterward for students that Laurie peeked into gave him his best opportunity to tell how to make fiction happen.

Ford writes longhand, a point that made me smile; I bought another fountain pen last week, so I could write slower on first draft, from Pen City, the greatest resource for writing instruments and ink. Ford reads everything aloud, another fundamental. But on that Powell's interview link there's a story about him reading 700 pages of a manuscript aloud, twice through, to his wife. Permit yourself the freedom to pursue excellence, he said. At 61, he's had time enough to achieve that over and over. The service of a dedicated spouse who'll listen to a 700-page manuscript must really help. I have a lot of spirited support from Abby, who I have probably read 700 pages to over the last 10 years. Thanks, honey.

We talked about Larisa's plot and character revelations, pushing ideas both good and hair-brained at her like a couple of fledgling psychologists. I put sunblock on my forehead while the March day rolled past 75, and I squinted a lot while I faced the sun, but enjoyed the white light off my notebook while I wrote down what Ford said. Texas State has passed on both me and Laurie for its MFA writing program, but that doesn't mean we can't still be learning about writing from its program.

Near the end of our gathering we looked at a little scene I'd composed for Viral Times, my long-term novel project. I have my best chance at simple language in my first drafts. I've got a blog on the project, a place to publish the raw material before I do all my reading aloud.

The Miles Begin to Mount Up Now

2005-03-20T18:26:00.000-06:00

Today we finished our first ride of more than 30 miles to train for the Hill Country Ride for AIDS. The spring has been rainy and cold until recently, so we're running behind schedule on our training. This year I am learning to care about more than my own conditioning, because I'm a training ride leader. That leading is the service that I hoped the HCRA would let me deliver when I joined the ride two years ago.

Today's ride out to the Mansfield Dam on Lake Travis and back was challenging, as well as affirming. The last time I did this ride I was two years younger, riding a heavier bike. Today both the bike and rider were lighter, and I had the juice to help people with flats and ride alongside those who were mounting the hills to the dam for the first time.

There's a managing component for this year's ride, too. Saturday I "convened" the ride around the loops on South Mopac, a close-in ride leaving from a local elementary school.

That's me in the picture, third from the left, looking at my watch to give the intermediate riders a five-minute head start. Pushing off on time is important to respect everyone's time they donate on their weekends.

All that rain means the wildflowers are already popping up alongside the highways, including our famous Texas bluebonnets. There were plenty today on our 36-mile Mansfield Dam route, with more high hills than I wanted in the last six miles. While crossing the peak of the Crystal Mountain ridge, I was hoping it was the last hill of the afternoon. There were several more waiting. As a ride leader I had already stopped to help fix a flat and rode alongside newer riders to encourage them to finish out the day.

Abby mounted her bike today too, and finished 18 miles all the way to the dam, including lots of hills! It's her first year, a daunting one since she's never ridden more than 30 miles in a day. She takes to the road with cheery hope.

Here she's saddled up for a turn around our neighborhood, which has plenty of steep hills if you take the right turns. I'm so proud of her. First year training rides can be as scary as the 120 miles we'll do on the ride April 30-May 1.

This coming Saturday is the Dripping Springs ride, our longest of the training schedule. Today was a great warm up. This was my first week of more than 60 training miles this year. Next week I'll top 70.

They're all off to college, or learning, soon

2005-03-18T18:53:00.000-06:00

Nick, his girl Elisha, and Nate at our Valentines' Day Party

A long letter from my brother Bob in Ohio, a phone call from my friend Steve in Maryland: They each tell tales of getting their girls into colleges. Bob's daughter Carlye is already in college, even though she won't graduate high school until June. The state of Ohio pays for college at a state school for the seniors who make the grade. In Maryland, Steve's daughter has been accepted at the Eastern Shore's Washington College, where a lot of scholarship money awaits.

Here in Texas, our boys have been learning about life in the real world. Nate turned 33 last week, and his latest goal is to break out of the shackles of HEB produce by becoming a jailer in Williamson County — so they'll put him through the police academy after a year of service. Nick is finishing his first full-time pay period at Compass Bank, where he works as a teller. Nick met me for burgers, beers and pool Wednesday night at Waterloo Ice House. He'd driven up from downtown and got there before me. I walked in to see him with his blue dress shirt sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, enjoying a Labatt's Blue out of the bottle at Happy Hour. Another milestone crossed for me as a dad — seeing my grown son waiting for me at happy hour after he's clocked out from the job. That's a lot of years down the road for us, from ordering burgers for us and drinking sodas, then driving down to Slick Willie's pool hall to show him the first things about how to shoot pool. Once we finished our burgers on Wednesday, he drove me down to the pool hall in his car, then picked up the tab at the pool hall. Kind of a graduation in itself, I guess — paying for some fun after a day at the job.

At the top of the Bee Caves hill

2005-02-27T18:12:00.000-06:00

This hill on Loop 360 climbs the exit to Bee Caves Road. That monster hill challenges all of us while we ride our HCRA training rides. On this afternoon, I'm smiling wider, because I have helped my wife Abby up this hill on her bike — her first time up, riding right alongside me, defying gravity. I'm so proud of her.

Posted by: Ron Seybold.

The New Public Library

2004-11-15T19:21:00.000-06:00

Just got back from Borders, where I spend a few hours every Monday while the wife teaches yoga in our house. I load up the briefcase with writing and some reading, then sit at the store's cafe with a coffee to scribble a draft or read. Borders' tables often sport leftover books in this chain bookstore's cafe. It's not uncommon to see a table with a half-dozen books or more. Tonight I sat down in front of a serious pile of resume and cover letter how-to's. Several were aimed at the teacher looking for a spot on someone's faculty.

Just ten years ago that pile might have been in the public library. You couldn't drink coffee there, of course, but that was where the research happened. Today the bookstore cafe is popular with the younger customer who doesn't have a quiet place in their shared apartment to study. Or the money to buy the books they need to research papers or articles. Hey, it's a temptation to a journalist on a budget, too. Now the library is just as likely to be crowded with people surfing the Internet. When I visited a grand old branch in my hometown of Toledo, I had no competition for the swank seat in front of the big bay window.

The staff at my Borders scoops up the research books and discarded magazines every hour or so, re-stacking them like a librarian might have done a decade ago. I figure the bookstores encourage this grazing. Most of them have comfy armchairs right out on the sales floor. Even the independent stores are embracing this borrowing. If it crimps the sales of the non-fiction titles, well, that's a problem for the publishers and the authors to resolve.