Both Tina and I had trouble with the Get command, taking three or four tries for success, but we’ll work that out. Loken certainly knows the command, it is up to us to elicit his response.
The test is primarily about safety, and I didn’t see any issues on that front. We had to be extra careful about the hot asphalt and keeping the dogs hydrated. Tonight, we celebrate with the other families in our class.
We are very, very excited, but also very busy as we study and practice for our ADI public certification test. This will be a quick post with a couple of photos, since I need to be in class in five minutes.
Loken meeting Kevin for the first time:
Loken really enjoys laying in the sun. He was raised in Seattle, so maybe that has something to do with it.
And a few pictures of Loken as a puppy, one with his Puppy Raiser. Thank you, Allen.
]]>We will be training for a Skilled Companion Dog for our older son. CCI calls this a Skilled Companion Team:
A three-part team including a child or adult with physical, developmental or emotional disabilities, a primary caretaker, and a Canine Companion who helps with physical tasks and creates a bond of companionship, affection and love.
My wife, my older son, and I will be in training for the next two weeks. We will live on campus in Santa Rosa, and our younger son will stay home, go to school, and live with friends for one week and have his grandparents as companions for the second week. He’s being great about this. We are going to have a wonderful new dog, and he knows that he has to make room for his brother to be the best friend. How amazing is that?
The dogs really are wonderful. Here is a photo from our interview. The trainer is in the wheelchair and the dog is quiet and attentive, waiting for the next command. My audition was with this dog, and he was a joy. I told him “let’s go” and he walked with me, keeping light contact with my leg to stay close.
Our son is developmentally delayed but doesn’t have major physical handicaps, so some friends have (reasonably) asked what a service dog can do for him. I think that is best answered by this video of Cole and Skilled Companion Ilia. Watch how Ilia puts her head on him (the “visit” command), how he holds the leash for security in physical therapy, and how Ilia is so careful to be close but not in the way in the solo dog walk. Warning: have a hankie ready.
Video of Cole and Skilled Companion Ilia (YouTube, 3:24)
If you are curious how a Service Dog can help, as opposed to a Skilled Companion Dog, read about Thida Cornes and her magical dog Hermione.
For a taste of Team Training, read Thida’s My Hermione matching story. I expect I’ll be a bit busy to liveblog our training.
This is a big commitment. We will be helping our son bond with the dog (we are not the dog’s best friend, he is). We’ll have a big friendly dog in our family for years. We will have epic levels of dog hair (one friend estimates that 60-80% of their food intake goes directly to hair production). We will be maintaining the training and teaching new commands. We will be re-tested yearly to retain our ADI certification. The dog will go to work with one of us every day — CCI rules don’t allow the dog to be alone for more than four hours. It should also be loads of fun. I’m already checking out dog-friendly trails in the area.
]]>“And while we’re at it, how come a girl doesn’t get to blow up the Death Star! Or send ET home? Or defeat Captain Hook! Or Destroy the Ring of Power!”
Thanks for the pointer from Meg McCarron.
]]>Here are links to a Hacking Netflix blog posting (likely to remain a valid URL) and to the Netflix job posting (guaranteed to succumb to link rot as soon as the opening is filled).
The only other published numbers I’ve found are similar, $6.20 to $14.67 per jazz CD depending on the detail in 2003 at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. They were given a collection of 6200 jazz records and were estimating what that gift would cost them. See the article How Much Will It Cost? Making Informed Policy Choices Using Cataloging Standards.
The Netflix numbers are probably closer for an ecommerce or search application. Still, the close agreement in the numbers makes it pretty safe to say “less than $10 per document”.
Remember that the metadata must be updated when the document changes. Maybe “$10 per document per year” is a better number. HP was spending about that much to manage the HP-UX spec (man pages) about ten years ago. That covered all activities, not just metadata.
The Netflix job posting is for six openings, each with a six week duration. That sounds like a lot of work, but if I assume each writer does three synopses per hour (seems very fast for finished work), that is still only 4300 movies. Metadata is very, very expensive.
I have a couple of other stories without dollars, but still instructive.
One publishing company needed to digitize their back content and planned to start a division in the Philippines with 3000 employees to get it done. They found a different way.
I was consulting with a telecom company, and the CEO asked for metadata on every page in their intranet. They had 4M documents.
One final note, since I work for Netflix. All of the Netflix info here is derived from the job posting. No insider information was required or is included in this post.
]]>In a similar poll four years ago, 81% classified his presidency as a failure. Now, 98% do so, with 61% rating it the worst in history. One of those who placed him in the bottom third thought that it was too early to work out his exact placement in the bottom five alongside Buchanan, Johnson, Fillmore, and Pierce. Another felt that only Buchanan was worse.
The comments are even more damning than the raw numbers. My favorite diss is the unnamed historian who observes that George W. combines the worst characteristics of other failed presidents—“the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover.” Ouch.
It has been a few years since I loaded up Netscape Navigator 1.2, but dang, that was a fast browser. Give it a spin with your favorite historic release. For hints on what to install, scroll down in jwz’s post.
]]>That article starts off with people freaking out about Wi-Fi, but moves on to the EU publishing EMF exposure rules which effectively prohibit MRI tests. This is a double whammy for that technology. It started off as “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance”, an accurate term which scared people because it sounded nookyooler and might make them radioactive. The industry reacted nimbly and renamed it “Magnetic Resonance Imaging”, simultaneously preserving their profit and making a valuable diagnostic tool available to the ignorant.
Long article, but plenty of data for why the precautionary principle is bad policy.
]]>Tim Bray just did the same thing and his son is the same age as one of mine was.
I was very surprised at how The Fellowship of the Ring flowed when read aloud. I’d read The Hobbit to the boys the previous summer, and it was OK, but this book was really a step up. I’m guessing that J.R.R. read it to his wife until he got it right. He was a Beowulf scholar, so reading tales would have been natural for him. There is a story of him starting off the year proclaiming Beowulf in the original for the entire lecture.
Also, I never noticed that Tom Bombadil spoke in rhyme until I read it out loud. Hmm.
I did skip a very few spots when reading the books. There is a really long committee meeting where they are organizing the fellowship at Rivendell and things bog down. The Hobbit has this problem, too, when everyone gets together at Bilbo’s and just keep talking. Committee meetings don’t seem to work for reading aloud.
I also skipped a few gory bits in The Return of the King. And, that book didn’t read as smoothly as the others. The language got a bit fussier. Too many kings talking to each other, perhaps. At heart, it really is a novel of the heroism of the common people (“little people”?), so it works better when the merchants and farmers are in the spotlight.
Since Tim Bray links to a cool map of Middle Earth, I’ll link to something for those who are bored with gingerbread houses, The Battle of Pelennor Fields executed in candy. Take that, Tim. And my slipcased edition from the 70’s have the big fold-out maps anyway. And a price tag that I lettered when I worked in Waldenbooks, befofre bought it with the employee discount. So there. Physical media have such a different history than bits.
One other thing — the whole book is written at a walking pace and reading aloud seems to be the right speed. Only the bad guys and magicians have horses (Nazgul, elves, and Gandalf). Going fast is either very bad (you are being chased) or very, very good (you are on Shadowfax). There really is a lot of walking in the book. Tolkien did not like cars, so it may be that his writing follows the pace of his walking and cycling through England.
Overall, it works very well read aloud. Find an eight year old kid and try it.
]]>Note: NetNewsWire is now free. I don’t even mind paying them back then.
Four years later, I still don’t visit any websites regularly. These days, I even ditch web feeds that aren’t full-content, like The Economist’s Democracy in America. Well, except for Daring Fireball, and that is a big compliment.
This is fine if only I do it, but if lots of people follow suit it is a nasty turn of events for ad-supported websites. Way back in 1996, Infoseek couldn’t make a go of it as a subscription website and invented and patented banner ads. Twelve years later, we are talking billions of ad dollars.
Seriously, the web does not exist without advertising. Google is an advertising company (duh!), just like Infoseek was. 25% of the staff at Infoseek were in ad sales. 70% of Google works on ads. RSS feeds don’t show ads. This cuts off the oxygen supply for the whole web.
I suggested explicit Atom support for ads, but that didn’t get any traction. Now, I see separate “sponsored by” entries in two of my feeds. Hmm, one of them is Daring Fireball.
]]>I’m sad to lose the wunder@best.com address. It was my internet identity for a really long time, maybe fifteen years. It certainly goes back to pre-web, dialup internet. I had a shell account, and if you know what that is, you know your DCE’s from your DTE’s, I bet.
“wunder” is a lot older than wunder@best.com. My OS/370 batch processing account at Rice in Fall 1975 was WUNDERW and I switched it to WUNDER the next year. At The Rice Thresher, photo credits were first initial plus last name in all lower case. The period and space slowly disappeared (through the magic of kerning) over several issues to become “wunderwood” (thanks Mark). Both wunder and wunderwood live on at wunderwood.org.
wunder@best.com will bounce. Sorry about that, I can’t fix it. I own the new domain, so that will continue to work for a long time.
Best Internet Communication was a great provider, Mac-savvy, local, and even profitable. Check out the history at the link above for a taste of early ISPs.
After a couple of acquisitions, my old account is now with NTT/Verio. I need to have a chat with an account rep there, because their price list shows my account at $15/month and I’m paying $24.95. The joys of a grandfathered account.
]]>Before the screening, the director warned us, “you know this is a dirty movie”. He wasn’t kidding, but the sex was part of the story, not thrown in for titillation. If your main character is an alcoholic, you show them drinking, and if your main character is a sex addict, you show sex. The director was an actor first and it was clear that he really cared about his actors. He would only ask them to do that if the scene was really important to the story.
The movie isn’t really about sex any more than it is about feigning choking in restaurants or colonial theme parks or mental hospitals. Pinning down the “aboutness” is a little hard because the characters are so specific (the movie received a Sundance special jury award for ensemble acting) and the themes are so big — deception, affection, fear, trust.
A lot of the action is in places where people are pretending or acting or deluded: a mental hospital, a colonial reenactment village, a strip club. Truths that don’t matter are uncovered, like the stripper Cherry Daiquiri leaning down and whispering “It’s not my real name.” Some revealed information is not true. Some truths are incomplete or unwelcome.
Q&A with the director was mostly interesting for what he said about Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel Choke. Chuck told him to not be too faithful to the book. The director, Clark Gregg, said he wasted a year and a half by not following that advice. He only really made progress on the screenplay after separating it from the book. Palahniuk feels that his merging and retelling stories that he hears, a bit like a chain letter, and that someone working with his story should do the same thing. Palahniuk said that he most enjoyed the parts of the film that were new.
Choke is pretty raunchy in spots, so if you are convinced that you could not enjoy a film where two people duck out of the sex addiction 12 step meeting to screw in the bathroom, then don’t see this movie. Otherwise, give it a chance, and take someone with you because you’ll want to talk about it afterwards.
And after you see it, I’ll tell you something the director told us. But it is a bit of a spoiler.
]]>Yasukuni is a shrine to those who have died fighting for Japan. Their names are recorded at the shrine and a sword represents their glorious deaths. In World War II, so many Japanese died at sea and in places where remains could not be recovered that Yasukuni is the only place for families and comrades to visit them. The closest thing in the US is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
In 1978, Yasukuni recorded the names of war criminals from WWII and became controversial. The emperor stopped his yearly visit, and the shrine became associated with an inflexible nationalism.
There are good parts in the documentary and you do learn a lot about Yasukuni. Here are some of the parts that connected with me.
Watching the last remaining sword maker at Yasukuni make a sword. The interviews with him were less satisfactory, especially the one where we watch this 90 year old man think about something for two minutes then not say anything. Yeesh.
A protester outside Yasukuni is gathering signatures to ask Mainichi Shinbun (a major quality newspaper) to retract a story about her grandfather taking part in a “beheading contest” between Japanese officers. This was in China, beheading prisoners with Japanese swords, perhaps even swords made at Yasukuni. The footage is followed by a whole series of contemporary reports from newspapers, excitedly following the contest with photos of the participants.
Prime Minister Koizumi defending his visit to the shrine in a press conference. He is soft spoken and direct, with none of the condescension I hear from our president. He is still a politician, saying he “can’t understand” the Chinese objections when clearly he can understand them, but his is a politician I can stand to listen to.
A veteran visiting the shrine at night, in heavy rain. He marches up, unsheathes his sword, salutes, resheathes it, and marches away.
Two women sitting on a bench talking about Yasukuni. One of them describes the letters that boys would give to their sisters before leaving for the front. They would write, “we will meet again at Yasukuni”.
A final montage of historical footage: soldiers training with swords, a kamikaze pilot placing his sword into his cockpit, an officer leading a charge with his sword, Hirohito visiting Yasukuni. Even this montage is too long, but it is exactly the right ending for the film.
]]>We didn’t get many of our first choices for tickets this year, but we are still seeing plenty of interesting stuff:
Our tickets are mostly for documentaries, so we don’t expect overlap between those and the prize winners.
Other movies we’d like to see:
Yikes! Too many interesting films! Hmm, we have a fair overlap with Michael Rubin’s choices.
If you feel an urge to track Sundance, I like the coverage at Cinematical’s Sundance section.
]]>Click on anything blue and underlined.
When you change the color of the links or change the underline, you invalidate the entire user manual. When you do Flash and fancy 2.0 stuff, you invalidate the entire user manual. Even “click on images, too” is a big risk.
Sometimes it is worth confusing the user, but it always consider doing it the simple way.
Jakob Nielson agrees as the first part of his cautionary article about Web 2.0. Follow that (very dark blue) link, by the way. It is an excellent article.
If you are inclined to blow off Jakob, remember that it’s the law. A “click on the blue stuff” site is about 99% ADA-compliant already.
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