Jeffrey McManus

Link: Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - New York Times

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

The article described how the author Lady Antonia Fraser had been obliged to wait for 20 minutes in freezing weather just to enter the building, and another 20 minutes to leave her coat at the mandatory check-in desk.

It described how another writer, Christopher Hawtree, had been “forced to perch on a windowsill” because he could not get a desk.

To my way of thinking this has far less to do with British schoolgirls annoying people by giggling in a hallowed institution of learning and far more to do with the way that academics seek to impose their mores on students. It is a fact today that most students have mobile phones and a lot of them have laptops. Would it be unreasonable to adapt to this? It seems natural that the “net native” generation would turn to collaboration more readily than previous generations (and why is this necessarily a bad thing?). The problem isn’t these boisterous kids, it’s that our academic institutions (once again) haven’t caught up to the way that people want to learn, communicate and collaborate. The institution of the library clearly isn’t serving these students’ needs. That doesn’t make it automatically the students’ fault; it may not even be Lady Antonia Frasier’s fault. It seems more likely that we are actually in need of a new kind of institution, one with some aspects of a library but without its monastery-esque structure and mindless bureaucracy.

I’m running into this kind of thing myself as I take a community college class this semester (which I know I haven’t mentioned here yet — I’m planning on saying a lot more about this once the semester is over). Suffice it to say that when you see a huge sign outside a campus media center that says NO COMPUTERS ALLOWED and doesn’t permit students to photocopy out-of-print texts under the principle of academic fair use, there’s something fishy at work there — it certainly isn’t the interests of students that are being served.

Link: Hoopty Rides: The Long Road to the Cover of Make Magazine.

"As an amateur in all things, I have found great commonalities to approaching subjects as a newbie. I think the greatest skill that could be taught in schools is how to be a professional amateur as that is the single skill set that unlocks everything. Nobody likes to assist a know-it-all, but there are lots of stone killer experts that get a kick out of sharing knowledge with thoughtful individuals that are deeply curious, respectful, have a firm handshake, don’t interrupt and will meet your eye."

Veteran blogger Mister Jalopy has some poignant thoughts to commemorate getting on the cover of Make Magazine. We learned long ago to respect Mister Jalopy’s wisdom, which is why we had him officiate at our wedding back in 2000.

Link: The Magic Is in the Tweaking

Entrepreneurs are stubborn souls, not easily discouraged by something like initial failure. And, while there are no exact figures, according to small-business specialists, it is quite common for a founder to stumble at first, only to find a way to bounce back soon after.

Link: Officials Reach California Deal to Cut Emissions - New York Times.

The Assembly speaker, Fabian Núñez, who sponsored the bill along with Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, said at a news conference here, "We feel that California has always been a leader in protecting the environment."

"We now have moved it to the next level,” said Mr. Núñez, a Los Angeles Democrat. "We’d all like to see California one day be carbon free."

This makes me a little nervous, particularly in light of the ban on liquids on airplanes. I mean, if they’re not going to allow my body fluids and they’re not going to allow my carbon, there’s not going to be much of my body left to do anything with. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they find calcium harmful and start banning peoples’ skeletons, etc.

Lin by renshin39171.

More photos of our friend Linda, who passed away last week, are here.

Tim posts on a talk given by somebody who is seriously trying to convince us that all the oil is running out.

Some people (including Chuq) posted in Tim’s comments that this sounds farfetched, and if it weren’t for the war and some short-term supply problems driving up the price of gas, this kind of talk wouldn’t get much play since it’s been on people’s minds for many years now. I vividly remember going through the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry during the oil shock of the 1970s and seeing a futuristic electronic countdown of how much oil the world had left. I seem to recall the countdown was at about thirty years or so. It’s now thirty years later, so clearly the doomsayers made a boo-boo.

It’s easy to freak out about this kind of stuff because people react more to bad news than good news. But I’m more of an Ultimate Resource 2 guy (the idea is that no natural resource will really ever run out as long as the real ultimate resource — the human mind — can figure out ways to synthesize more of the resource, or invent our way around the need for it).

That said, we obviously do need to get off the oil anyway. If stories like this prod us in the direction of pebble-bed reactors cracking hydrogen or big fusion tokamaks churning out the cheap and clean juice so I can run 20 more servers under my desk at home while I whiz to work at 150mph for a total monthly energy charge of $0.85, then I suppose it’s just as well.

(This is the second post tonight that I started writing as a comment on someone else’s blog, hm, wonder what that means.)

I was wondering how to say "pope" in German yesterday and I noticed in a news photo today that it’s "Pabpst". That means for you trucker-hat-wearing hipsters who are re-discovering America’s worst lager, you’re really drinking Pope Juice, ha ha. I’m thinking this also means that we should be able to come up with a better nickname for the big guy than "Ratzo" or "Ben".

For some reason I can’t fathom, I’m obsessed with the ritual of papal succession. I don’t really follow il papa’s doings when he’s not dying or being elected, and I’m not Catholic or anything, but for some reason, I could not get enough pope news in the last month. I realize that may make me weird, but as I mentioned yesterday I’m generally weird when it comes to news consumption.

On the way to work this morning Carole half-heard something on the radio and said "huh?" She thought it was weird that the Cardinals would be performing ancient rituals and voting in secret when they should be, you know, playing baseball down in St. Louis or somewhere. No, dear, this is the College of Cardinals. You know, the ones in Rome, picking a pope.

Maybe you had to be there, but I thought it was funny. Anyway.

This was the first day commuting down to work with the whole family. It was pretty cool! Celeste took to the iPod pretty well, except on the way home, she complained of pain in her ear. We’re hoping it was a pre-existing ear infection (since she was only hurty in one ear) and not, as I initially feared, a result of blasting the soundtrack from Mary Poppins at maximum volume for an hour during our freeway commute home.

Attention, Masters of Business Administration of Corporate America: Quit using the word ‘learnings’. It makes you sound really stupid. The word you really want is ‘lessons’.

Your pal,

Jeffrey

I was looking up directions on Yahoo Maps last night (last-minute driver’s license renewal, blah). While looking at the map I noticed that Yahoo Maps thinks there’s a neighborhood in SF called “Doelger City”. A little Googling reveals that at one point, the Sunset district was mostly built by a guy named Doelger and at one point it was known as Doelger City. Does anybody use this term today? I wonder where Yahoo unearthed it?

I had some sadness yesterday when I went out to the parking lot and my beloved Cherokee wouldn’t start up. Here’s a photo of the Puttomobile being hauled off to the shop this morning.

I really hate it when my car breaks down. It’s really just a matter of inconvenience and money, but for some reason I get all bent out of shape about it. It could be that I know zero about cars and I feel totally helpless when something goes wrong. I can’t even change a tire. I’m a loser, I know.

I perked up significantly this afternoon when I found out that I’d won this huge award at work. Among other things, my internal evangelism of weblog and RSS technology was called out in the award. You can see this today on the Developers Program weblog, but you’ll start to see this technology appear in more places on eBay soon. If you are a developer using the eBay API, the weblog is now the best and fastest way to get information regarding what’s going on with the API platform. Soon you’ll be able to get this kind of information for the main eBay.com site as well, which will be most excellent for buyers and sellers as well as developers.

I’m totally humbled by the award — today I’m the lone geek sitting in a business unit populated by mostly MBAs, so when I came to work here I wasn’t 100% sure that I’d fit in, and even if I did if I’d be able to accomplish anything significant. I am now 100% sure. :)

Update: Just got off the phone with the shop, the car is fine — just a dead battery and a blown fuse.

I like brainstorming. I have this tendency to be really critical in brainstorming sessions a lot of the time, but ultimately I think that the best brainstorming sessions happen when participants try to come up with both the best idea and the worst idea. I think I may have accomplished this when we recently tried to cook up a catchy new name for the eBay Developers Conference (which will take place in New Orleans in June of 2004). I won’t say what I think the “best” name was until the name of the conference is officially announced, but I will share what I think the “worst” name was: “eBay CODE HOOTENANNY 2004.” Dig it!

Tim O’Reilly at COMDEX last week: “The future is here, it just isn’t evenly-distributed yet.” (When I first heard him say this, I suspected he was quoting somebody, not to diminish Tim’s ability to be pithy, etc. The big Google-o-matic tells us that it’s from William Gibson, as the most excellent Cory Doctorow points out in this review.)

Last week at Fry’s I picked up a teeny tiny $20 Targus optical mouse for use with laptops, on planes, etc. I carry it around with me in my bag. The really cool thing about the mouse that I didn’t realize until I got it out of the box, though, is the fact that the cable that connects the mouse to the computer has this neat little reel in the middle. If you only want the cable to be three inches long, you pull out three inches, and the rest of the cable resides in the reel, nice and tidy. To get the whole thing to retract into the reel, you just push a little button and it reels itself in automatically, sort of like the way a tape measure works.

Now I want an ethernet cable with the same kind of reel attached to it, because sometimes I want an ethernet cable that’s five feet long, but sometimes I want it to be fifteen feet long. I’d totally pay a premium for this kind of thing (especially after I went to Fry’s this week and bought, you guessed it, a thirty foot ethernet cable and a separate fifteen foot cable). I’d much rather pay 50% more for a single retractable cable than pay 200% more for two cables.

If only Radio Shack’s new Director of Innovation were listening…Dave?

Update Douglas Coler writes in to say that Keyspan already sells this kind of thing. Excellent…