Hat’s off to Lewey Geselowitz. I never played Quake 2 — believe it or not, I was a Deep Space 9 guy — but this is the coolest mod I’ve seen for a game yet. Crazy, crazy — I actually expect a dragon to pop out, or an American eagle, or Pamela Anderson.

“Quake II AbSIRD is a modification of the standard Quake II rendering engine so that it can create SIRDS instead of normal 3D environments. This means that you can play Quake II just as you normally would (single player, network play, most mods, etc) except all the 3d objects and characters will jump out at you with the full 3D power of SIRDS.”

Jump out, yeah. I still can’t quite figure out how your visual acuity is affected by mutants with chainsaws. I know my reaction time ain’t that great.

Quake 2 AbSIRD at Lewey’s World

Apparently, real researchers have finally found the rosetta stone of public speaking, and it’s intercourse. That’s right, all your visions of fright and peril are awash in a warm glow with only a quick brush of love in the back seat.

Volunteers who’d had PVI [penile-vaginal intercourse – ed.] but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who’d only masturbated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the highest blood-pressure response to stress.

Check out the new truth here. Then get busy.

For those who don’t know much about University of Phoenix marketing, if you haven’t run across a banner or pop-up, let me bring you up to speed. Organization’s like UOP are cost per lead shops; advertising has only as much value to the company as can be assigned each individual new prospect on a volume basis. For example, if we do 20,000 blow-in inserts in a market that costs us $10,000 and see a return on that of 50 new leads, our cost per lead is $200. If we do a direct mail drop to 75,000 that costs us $30,000 and we see 200 leads, our cost per lead is $150. Internet? I’ll spare you the volume, but shooting for a cost per lead between $45 and $80 is pretty darned good. These are all just broad strokes examples.

A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0: Yeah, I read Zeldman. Most of the time, I don’t understand him. In this case, I don’t understand him.

Until the end. Then it all comes together and affects me. If you are wondering what AJAX is, this isn’t the piece for you. If you’re wondering whether it’s OK to keep going to work in the morning and serve your customers with integrity even though you haven’t stumbled on the next Pet Rock, give it a read. That Zeldman. Good guy.

Sophie’s in school, if I haven’t said anything about that already. She’s attending the Goddard School in our neighborhood four days a week. So far, we’re thrilled about the experience. Sophie loves it, she’s making some good little friends and the program brings the world to her, right in the playground: everything from the Oregon Zoo’s petting zoo program to the Children’s Museum.

Each week, the kids work on one letter of the alphabet. They write it, the bring things to school that begin with that letter, etc, then they bring homework that consists of tracing pages full of dashed glyphs of that letter for them to trace.

This is good stuff.

The Myth of the Product Adoption Lifecycle

One of the giant insights of the new marketing is that the only way to introduce a new idea is to move across the curve. Sell to the little tail, they tell the next group, which passes the word on to the mass market. That’s why the little tiny green tail is so valuable… these are the people who are listening, these are the people who will become your marketing force.

So, where’s the myth?

The myth is that marketers think these people actually care.

People don’t care, certainly not about marketers.

There was a time when bots were all the rage. I remember instant messaging with bots a decade ago through the university research departments that were attempting to simulate human intelligent conversation. They were charming enough, but you could always stump them with curses.

Soon after, the major players started using them to help customer call flow and voice response systems. Annoying little beasts that can’t understand the slightest hint of Jersey accent still pick up with Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, you name it — the list goes on.

But check this out. John Battelle writes a bit about the MakeBot, and instant messaging search utility that links the RSS of these particular sites with a back-end search function allowing access to site updates through your IM client of choice — providing, I assume, it’s AIM compatible. I’ve signed up to get the boingboing.net feed update every two hours and so far it works swimmingly.

But wait, there’s more! To see this really take off, add MovieFone to your AIM buddy list and type a bit. This bot allows you to search the MovieFone database by title, location, theater, whatever, all through your IM client. I find it faster — far faster — than checking the site through the web. All I need to do is type 1 – 4 – Y – 1 to see a list of movies and times at my favorite theater in my neighborhood. It’s the Century Cinemas over at Cedar Hills, the one that serves warm KettleKorn instead of lameass movie popcorn. Of course, the bot remembers the last time I ran a search and so my zip is still cookie’d somehow, which cuts down my keystrokes.

The implications of this sort of connectivity are huge. It has the potential to have the same impact on customer service than online billpay had five years ago: it eliminates a simple problem with an elegant solultion. With billpay, it eliminated the hassle of managing checks and stamps with a few mouse clicks and auto-payment schedules. With MovieFone, it eliminates the interactive voice response program on the phone and the graphical nonsense and ad programs of the sites with a convenient and unobtrusive “buddy.”

Would advertising play? In a heartbeat. As John mentions, Google is probably salivating over this program. For me, the more interesting implications are in teaching remedial programs to university students. For example, we’ve completely automated our grammar tool online with 90+% accuracy. What if students could open their IM client of choice and paste in a paragraph to the GrammarBot, and receive a near-instantaneous response with corrections, suggestions, tips, and tools? More important, what if a student could submit passages to a PlagiarismBot and get a Google search return of the top ten sites with 85% or greater likeness?

Ah, the heady odeur of success.

Or, whatever.

This year, as my Christmas present from the office, I got promoted. That’s right, it’s the best Christmas present ever, if you’re on the look-out for a bright new pair of golden, fuzzy, warm, vibrating handcuffs.

Go here, with great haste. If you’ve always wanted to be Superman, maximize your browser and get real close to the screen.

When Sophie was gestating (I *heart* gerunds), I kept a fairly rigorous blog on the whole becoming a father process. I was a complete nut about it and thought, somehow, others would be as interested in the inner-workings as I was. In hindsight, the whole thing was clearly more for me which is, I think, as it should be.

Things are officially changing again. Kira is now 20 weeks along with our second child, heretofore referred to as “Seed2″ (sic) and today we saw the pictures. (Note new banner text on this page. It is so very 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Some background. If you’ll recall, the last time we did this whole baby thing, it was a pretty traditional birth. Kira got herself knocked up, we went to class, we did the homework, we scheduled the birth, induced, and Sophie exploded from between Kira’s legs like a live turkey in hot oil. That’s the Cliff’s Notes version, anyway. Short story shorter: we had a doc in a hospital.

This time, we’re going water birth. What does that mean, you ask? Excellent question. I don’t know much, but what I hear is that they give birth in a bathtub and the baby comes out smooth and happy and doesn’t cry. That’s what it says on the brochure anyway. Thing is, I remember the last birth. Don’t get me wrong because I’m all about the whole earth birth process, but there was a whole bunch of thrashing and tossing about, not to mention the gallons of *mess* involved. Doing this in a tub… isn’t there some danger of drowning?

Clearly, I have a lot of research to do before I weigh in on this one way or another. Which, of course, will do me no good whatsoever since Kira’s already made up her mind and last I checked, I’m not so pregnant, myself.

We’re doing this whole thing up at OHSU. That’s the Oregon Health Sciences University high up on Markham hill here in Portland. Imagine Hogwart’s, but a hospital that houses thousands of doctors, nurses, students, and sick people with all their cars all pouring off of a hill. It’s not entirely dissimilar from the Cistine Chapel on the head of a pin, though the Cistine Chapel is smaller. We’ve been there once so far and when we finally made to the actual office, it was great. There was some walking, tunneling, shimmying, and sneaking to do it, but we made it.

Today, we had to start on one end of the campus with the Ultrasound people. They put us on this super cool, super new Phillips(TM) Sono-Wonder 9000 with this perfectly clear high resolution display and many wires and buttons. It also had a trackball, which I see as an homage to devices gone by: heart-warming, that.

They lubed Kira up with the warm jelly and started the procedure. And there it was. Seed2.

I’ve been having a hard time, honestly, getting my head around having a second child. I’m an only child, you see? I was pretty used to having my folks all to myself and since they didn’t have a whole lot of choice either, they had me to hang with. The relationship we’ve established over the years has come to be very powerful and important to me, and I’d always imagined that I’d be able to establish the same with my only child.

Kira has a sister.

Sitting there, looking at that screen, brought the whole thing back to me. The late nights, the logistics, the money, the diapers, it was all so crystal clear at that moment. The first time I caught Sophie standing up in her crib. The first time she smiled. The first time I got to take her to a movie.

I remember talking about kids with my boss. He has four. He told me that I’d be surprised when the second one comes around because I’d find that I wouldn’t have to split my love between them; somehow, somewhere, more love appears.

All these moments with Sophie, they were gifts, every one of them. And today, I caught up with them all while looking at that screen, at Seed2, and somehow, somewhere, love appeared.

The technician was fantastic. She showed us the face, the legs and arms, the little hands opening and closing. For what they could see, the baby is in fine shape. Spine is closed, brain is closed, lip is non-cleft, the world is all put together. With as much “Grey’s Anatomy” we’ve been watching, we’ve been starting to wonder how these little things get put together in one piece; word has it, they come together more often than they don’t.

We didn’t want to know the sex. I’ve been telling people that it’s because the whole experience of telling the world that “It’s a Girl!” was so spiritual the first time around. Then, we were in that room and it all changed. I wanted to know. I wanted to know something awful. I tried to talk about it out loud, my change of heart, but I got the smackdown from Kira. So be it.

After the ultrasound, they have one of the doctors from the high-risk baby unit come in and debrief us. We had Dr. Trosos, a nice generically foreign guy who tells us that the baby is fine. With all they could see, there were no problems. That by the time we get back to the midwife, his comments would be in the computer and that we could review the detail with her. Again, so be it.

We hike back to the midwife. She’s nice, new to us, but charming. She introduced us to a cool new pharmacy with naturopathic pharmacists. I didn’t know they made those.

There’s the midwife, reading through the results from Dr. Trosos. “This is fine with that. This is aligned with this correctly. The baby is developing this and that fine, and all of this is aligned with her this.”

Catch that? I’ll repeat the salient point: “… all of this is aligned with her this.” Then she says, “Oh, so you’re having a little girl!”

Yeah, the midwife read that part out loud and confirmed it. Kira remained calm. I was, oh, boiling over inside that fate was on my side with this one. Kira says, “Well, we didn’t want to know that.” Then, the back-peddling began. The poor midwife was dancing. “Oh, I’ve never seen this before, I’m sure he didn’t mean it, back-peddle, back-peddle, back-peddle, it’s probably wrong.”

And there’s room for that, too, of course. Before you get all hung up on the fact that it must be a girl, like I am, there’s a good chance that the good foreign Dr. Trosos did not actually know the gender. After all, he didn’t see the whole ultrasound. The only way he would have known is if the tech actually told him, right? And according to her, she doesn’t remember gender up to five minutes after the session. And you know, the doctor could have been referring to Kira.

So, could it have happened? Could she have walked out, handed the file to the Doc and said, “So, this is for a little baby girl in exam room two.” I like to think there’s room in this reality.

There it is. There you have it. That’s the story. I’m sure there will be more in the coming weeks. That, and I’ll have to get some good Sophie updates here before too long. She’s three, and a
ll she really wants me to do any more is check her poop before she flushes it.

So be it.

With great humility, he climbs to the top of the hill, into the valley, and higher still to the crest of the great peak. He tears his shirt from his back, musculature throbbing, nee pulsing and twitching excitedly. He rears his head back far and, choking just a bit, he wails: “I HAVE DONE IT!”

Yeah, that’s right, after four years of failure I’ve finally beat the damned beast on my shoulder and cranked out 50,000 (more actually) words. And the craziest thing? Not that hard.

Getting started, hard. Words 10,000-18,000, a bitch. Then the story discovered itself and cranked on through to the end. Took a decidedly strange twist about half-way through when I realized that the characters were not so much being written as they were living right through me. It’s a bizarre experience, actually, and one I’m anxious to repeat.

I just returned from our Thank God It’s Over party at our illustrious local coordinator’s place here in Portland. Apparently, we as the Portland crew came in 11th worldwide, an auspicious accomplishment considering our group beat the New York group.

What’s next? More writing. One of my fellow participants told me her New Year’s Resolution last year was to collect at least 12 rejection letters. I thought that was fantastic, rewarding activity instead of just success in a sort of “glass is almost getting to half-empty” way. She failed, actually, collecting only nine rejections and two successes. Damned successes — snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, that.

I’m shelving the book for a few months. I’l probably start editing in February and see where it goes from there. At a minimum, I’ll drop the $500 bucks to self-publish through iUniverse so all my friends can buy it for themselves on bn.com.

Because that is the coolest thing in the world ever, ever, ever.

The last class I taught at University of Phoenix, I caught two students of the twelve enrolled cheating flagrantly in their online work. I’d heard that academic honesty was an issue of growing concern in online education but to date, I’d had no experience with any student violations of University policy.

Now, the process for reporting violators is particularly stomach-churning. You have to thoroughly document each infraction which, for one of the students, amounted to 18 specific incidents in a 5-day period. I managed to submit my treatise and the response I recieved from the administration was a prompt thank you and notice that each student had received their first warning with a letter placed in their files. First warning. The class I was teaching at the time comes with only four classes left to the end of the degree program. With violations this vast in scope, I find it difficult to believe that these students happened to choose me as the only subject of their violations through their entire academic careers.

Still, I read articles like this one, from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and I can see the hope for online education, if only from the demand side. It’s a general piece, but if you want an good update on the state of online growth as we close out 2005, here’s a good place to start.

The Motorola ROKR phone has quickly become the stuff of legend. Launched as the first real convergence of entertainment and culture — music and telephony — the implementation of iTunes has all but been drowned in the hysterical hype of the iPod Nano and the new iPod with video.

Motorola chief Ed Zander had this to say in a post-earnings announcement interview reprinted in Bloomberg:

For pics that go along with Day 3-4, click here.

Woke to the usual tricks: juice, coffee, and carbs by the pool. Dodge and Sophia had a meeting and left most of us to our own designs today. Since we have precious little direction, we were all thankful with John, resident expert, whips out his bad brain and convinces us that we need to pile in the car and go see us some old stuff.

For pics that go along with Day 2, click here.

Mr. Nikos runs the villas where we’re staying and appears to do all the heavy lifting. When I say heavy lifting, I mean this guy’s a pack mule. He runs up and down the stairs of this place without breaking a sweat, carrying heavy luggage, groceries, laundry, whatever, all hoisted up on his back. We’re embarrassed to be around him. he makes us feel small. This is, of course, not to dismiss his (what I have to assume is his) daughter Georgia, a cute little hyper-tensive that keeps the books and shows us to our rooms. She also brings us Frappes by the pool. She’s a dear.

So, our first morning, day 2, starts with breakfast by the pool. The kind Mr. Nikos delivers a basket of bread, a selection of butter and jams, two cups American coffee and OJ, and sets it all out for us with tablecloth on the small table in front of our door. He’s a real gentleman, this Mr. Nikos, obviously trained at the Empress.

Then, it’s time for a walk with the groom.

What a stupid idea that turned out to be. Intentions were good and all, with a little window shopping on the promenade and some more general beauty included, but mostly, it ended up with a lot of pain. I’ve talked about the stairs, right? There are a lot of them. And you think this isn’t a big deal — we’re young and virile men. You think, we’ll just stroll down to the water. “I hear there’s a marina down there!”

“Really?”

“Really!”

“Gosh! We should go see it!”

“Marina? Are you kidding? That’s why I’m HERE!”

Smile. Hug. Begin whistling.

At the top of this little town, where the stairs begin, we run into Dr. Doug. His shirt is off and he’s purple, pacing back and forth across a stone veranda. His first words as he points, “Those people over there think I’m dying. I don’t think I’m dying… I don’t think so…” He sits.

Doug had gone down the stairs. He’d taken the trip to the marina on a jog (which, it turns out, you shouldn’t actually take on a dare) and he recommended we not follow suit. Stupidly, we follow suit.

The trip down was not so bad. My knees were killing me just a little bit, but overall we were feeling strong. What better time for a full plate of fried squid, double-order of french fries, Greek salad and Mythos Hellenic Lager Beer!

Dodge’s brother Ben has been to Santorini. Since he couldn’t make it to the wedding, he sent Dodge this wonderful card and a set of pictures taken on the island. They were all part of a series — a pictorial treasure map to what Ben says is the most beautiful place he’s ever been ever in all his life. I’m taking some liberties with the language here, but the intent was right along those lines. Dodge and I had taken some time that morning to look through the pics and left it at something like, “sure would be cool to find that if we have time.”

There we were, eating our squid and fries when it hits me. We’re sitting in the restaurant that was in the first picture of the map! I could see, up around the bend, the out-cropping of rock where he must have been standing to take the picture. Giddy as a school-girl, I grab Dodge by the nipple and illustrate my discovery. We share great joy, pay, and follow the path.

Turns out it wasn’t much of a hike. About a hundred yards up around the corner we see a bunch of tourists snorkeling and voila — there’s the most beautiful place ever: a mini-Alcatraz about 30 yards out. Apparently, if you swim out to the other side, there’s a church there, and some cliff diving. It was really beautiful, to be sure, but I had my camera with me and no swim suit… and there was that thing about the four pounds of fried starch in my gut. So we snapped some pics and headed back.

Back to the stairs. Not to belabor the point, but if we were feeling strong coming down, we were feeling like idiots coming up. We were passed by donkeys. That’s right, a whole team of monkeys figured out that you can take DONKEYs up and down the hard stuff. An hour later, we were back at the villa, passed out by the pool.

Yeah, rough life.

That night, dinner and baklava. Often-naked Dr. Doug splurged for the duty-free Johnnie Walker Blue so we indulged in some good scotch by moonlight and played some guitar. Nice way to round out the day.