Thursday, July 11, 2002

Open source CMS conference in Berkeley (Sept 2002) #

From the website: The Second Open Source Content Management Conference will take place at the Julia Morgan Theatre for the Arts in Berkeley, 2460 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704 from Wednesday, 25 September to Friday, 27 September 2002. The event is organized by OSCOM, an international not-for-proft organization for the promotion of knowledge-sharing between developers of different open source content management software, frameworks etc.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/11/02; 5:16:38 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

New Yorker on Lance Armstrong #

I'm glad that Chris pointed to the fascinating profile of Lance Armstrong, which I read last night over a cup of Darjeeling tea.  I was resting and procrastinating a bit from some work.  I was amazed at what Armstrong can do with his body -- and his mind, how hard he can work and how much suffering he is capable of bearing.  Here's a passage on suffering: Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong's body is regularly inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules. "Depends whether you want to win," he replied. "I do. The Tour is a two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less. One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn't that much. So the people who win are the ones willing to suffer the most." Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton, Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it. "Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely cleansing," he wrote in his autobiography. "The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain. . . . Once, someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. 'Pleasure?' I said. 'I don't understand the question.' I didn't do it for pleasure. I did it for pain." Armstrong mentioned suffering (favorably) in each of my conversations with him. Even his weekend in Texas, which was ostensibly time off from the grinding spring training schedule, seemed designed to drive him to the brink of exhaustion; there were dozens of meetings with donors, cancer survivors, and friends. On Sunday, he led the foundation's annual ride with his friend Robin Williams, a surprisingly fit and aggressive cyclist. Williams and Armstrong rode at a fairly rapid pace for about two hours, at which point a car suddenly pulled up alongside them on the highway. Armstrong hopped off his bike, climbed in, and was driven to the airport to catch a plane for New York and then Paris. During his forty-eight-hour drop-in, the Lance Armstrong Foundation raised nearly three million dollars. After reading the article, I decided to get off my lazy butt to start working.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/11/02; 10:54:34 AM from the Personal Notes dept. Discuss

More from David Coursey on Microsoft Office #

In his column, he echoes some of my suggestions: 5. Merge the apps. I have a dream, that someday the individual applications in Office will go away and, instead of using Word on some documents and Excel on others, I'll have a single app capable of doing whatever I need. Microsoft has this vision, too: They call it "Universal Canvas" and include it as part of .Net. Using XML, all types of data (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, slides) could reside in a single document format and be properly displayed to the user. One thing this would do: Get rid of the pesky little interface inconsistencies that still exist among different Office apps. Those inconsistencies may be small (compare, for example, the way Word and Excel deal with wild-card characters). But for those of us who live in Office, they can be frustrating. 6. Make Office a platform for Web-services development. We hear a lot about how these new Internet-based applications are the wave of the future in computing. I'm not saying we should all learn programming. But I think people like you and me should be able to create active, Web-enabled documents using the apps we know without any special training.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/11/02; 10:48:43 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss