Someone's in the kitchen with WiFi

The AirPort has been earning its keep today. I convinced my wife that we needed wireless networking in the house because I would be able to keep an eye on our 10-month old in the more controlled environment of our baby-proofed downstairs while working if we had it. So she crawled around while I did a teleconference with a guy from PricewaterhouseCoopers today–I hope he didn't mind her screeching.
Now I'm working from my dining room table next to my younger son as he's doing his homework. I don't know how this is affecting my productivity (I have to admit that it's at something of a quarterly low right now as it is without the multitasking), but given I have hyper-focusing problems anyway, I'd probably only notice if the house was on fire when my Internet connection went down.

Let's go to the videotape

The guvmint claims to have obtained a video tape that they say proves Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks of Sept. 11.
So why aren't we watching it yet? Does the CIA need to do a little bit more editing with Final Cut Pro before it's ready for mass consumption?

Video doesn't prove anything anymore–especially not videotape. The boundaries of what's real and what's fabricated have been stretched to the breaking point already (as anybody who watches NFL football and appreciates the imaginary first-down line, or anybody who hated the fake billboards behind home plate during the World Series can attest). So offering up a video tape of Osama as the incontravertible truth of his guilt seems, well, just a little bit dicey to me.

But holding back the tape just makes its authenticity more dubious–any value it might have in convincing the world of his guilt could evaporate before anyone ever sees it.

Ratcheting up my connectivity

So, I've been gradually increasing my personal technology base recently. About two weeks ago, I acquired an Apple AirPort 2.0 base station and an AirPort card for my Ti Powerbook. The base station, which also acts as a NAT firewall, arrived just in time–one of my UPSs failed to kick in with a power dip, and the disk in my old Pentium Pro (which I had been running a firewall on) crashed, knocking the household LAN off the Internet
The Airport is easy to get up and running, as advertised. But it obviously doesn't like PC clients–it keeps cutting off the 2 W2K clients on my LAN from the net. I end up having to run ipconfig /renew a couple of times a day (every time my wife yells “The Internet is down!”) on them to get them reconnected. I tried using a constant ping to keep them from being timed out, but that didn't work; there doesn't appear to be a keepalive setting anywhere in the config for the AirPort, so there's no way to fix it in s/w. It's annoying as hell.
With my tech frustration level not yet maxxed out, I went out and got a WAP phone from AT&T. There's nothing more hellacious than putting a cell phone company in charge of something with an IP address. After about three hours on the phone with AT&T PocketNet tech support (and I have to admit they were at least courteous and well versed), I finally could get e-mail on my phone and surf a selected set of WAP sites. For another $10, I could get the privelage of entering my own URLs.
This is the fundamental problem with WAP service. Sure, there's a plethora of content offered up as part of my “Plus” service–and I'm only paying $7 a month for access to it–but there's no way for a content provider to go direct to the consumer. The cell phone company has re-intermediated the disintermediation that made the Internet what it has become.
Mind you, it's a lot easier for content providers to make money directly from the phone company. But it does raise the barriers to entry a bit higher. Which is part of why I think this whole m-commerce crap everyone keeps ranting about in the trades is still pie in the sky.
Still, it's nice to be able to get my e-mail from my personal POP account on my cell phone–and to be able to respond to it. And the price (free phone, essentially, plus $7 a month plus airtime) beats the RIM Blackberry by an order of magnitude or two.

Surviving

So, it's been a while since I last blogged. There are a couple of reasons; for one thing, I've been really busy (just look at my new magazine, Baseline, to see why).
About a month ago, Ed Cone and I visited the New Jersey data center of Cantor Fitzgerald.
The visit, about 5 weeks after the 9/11 attacks, dredged up a lot of memories for me. But there was no way I could begin to scale those emotions up to what the impact must have been on Joe Noviello and his colleagues at eSpeed who took the day off on Sept. 11 to go out on a fishing boat, only to have their trip cancelled a half-hour before the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Five weeks later, they were still running on adrenaline alone, it seemed.
Forget about a healing process–the emotional damage of 9/11 is done, and it will only fade into background, never disappearing completely. People survive by getting back into the grind, and finding pieces of comfort and catharsis where they can. We look at people like the folks who brought Cantor-Fitzgerald back to life two days after the company for all intents and purposes was wiped from the face of the earth, and ask how they could do it–the truth is, they couldn't have done anything else. Bringing the company back was their lifeline to normalcy.

Bombs Away…are you okay?

I was sitting in the parking lot of my local hyper-yuppie food emporium yesterday, while my wife ran in to get sushi for our lunch and my daughter slept in her car seat. We had just left church, and Paula had turned off the radio the second she heard the word “Taliban”. So I had no idea what was going on in the world–though I had suspicions when I saw the reporter and cameraman from the local ABC affiliate walking up to people in the lot.

We’re bombing Afghanistan, I thought. I turned the radio on again, and flipped over to the AM band (I’m absolutely sick of NPR right now). Sure enough.

The reporter strolled over. “Hey, do you mind?” he asked. “People in cars always make good shots.”

I consented, and the microphone was thrust in front of me.

“What’s your reaction to the attack on Afghanistan?”

I said, with the usual smattering of “um”s, that I was concerned; that I was a veteran that had served during operations in the Middle East, and I was familiar with the conditions there, and that I was concerned. I was concerned for my kids. I was concerned about the scale of the attack, and what the repercussions would be. And I was concerned about whether this would just be another act that contributed to the long laundry list of acts by the US government on our behalf that fed the (often justified) hatred of America in many parts of the world.

I made the news. And everything I said got broadcast. Except that last sentence.

Accidental Relics

Paula was sitting at her computer desk today when she realized that a plastic card sitting on it for the past two months was a room key from our stay at the Marriott World Trade Center. Among the sorrow surrounding 9-11, I got some small amount of relief to hear that everyone who worked at the hotel, as well as the guests still in the building, were evacuated safely before the first tower collapse.

Oh, by the way, once again I'm coaching CYO soccer–8 and under instructional league, St Pius X “Red” team. And with some key play by my star goalie and halfback, we bettered our record to 2-1-1, defeating Shrine of the Little Flower by a score of 4-1.
Shouts go out also to leading scorer Peter S., and his brother Jack, and Riley H. as well for their unstoppable offensive machine–not to mention Brendan, who came out of the goal after the first half to be a real offensive threat. And for Katya, who came back and played tough after getting run over by a kid three times her body mass. And to Gretchen and Annie, who hung tough and kept on top of the game.
And to the kids from Little Flower, who played tough all the way–you've come a long way, guys, and it could have gone the other way easily.
My older son's team also won today. I don't coach him, but you wouldn't know it from the amount of off-field direction I offered today (and the volume of it). They are now 2-1-1 as well, and looking pretty good for 5th graders.