May, 2006


30
May 06

priorities

i have to say that if the members of the house of representatives cared 1/2 as much about the privacy of actual american citizens (phone records 7 such) as they did about protecting the office of a ridiculously dopey & corrupt congressman who hid $100k in cash from bribes in tupperware containers in his freezer, i’d be significantly more optimistic about the state of our nation.

sigh.


22
May 06

edges

take a look at this blog post. it’s great. i need to spend some time when i’m not at work & read it again, as well as the pieces that it references, but i think it’s both reactionary and also what i happen to think. the web blends everything together, without much concern about who wrote what or where something came from. which isn’t necessarily bad, by itself. but it is tending to make the edges of each argument, work of art, or thought fuzzy and indistinct, blending into the rest of the web via links or ads or searches.

this one makes me think more about this stuff than i have in a while. it’s not the “inaccuracy” that they’re talking about that bugs me — that exists in all media, and is frequently point-of-view related, but also occasionally truth-based. it’s more the idea that expressions are losing their meaning as individual pieces of work in a synthetic, syncretic environment.


20
May 06

new patent

updated: the link below is to the actual patent declaration at the uspto — only click if it’s okay for you to look. lori pointed out that some employers don’t want folks to look at actual patents… check it out. brian, mike & i were just issued another patent for work at reactivity. that makes it a couple for my work at reactivity, and 3 for work at apple, notably, all alongside mike hanson.


16
May 06

international

lately i’ve been going through an interesting work transformation. since january, i’ve been spending a lot of time with Mozilla Japan, working on our adoption there, and recently i’ve been spending time with Mozilla Europe in France being sort of blown away by our traction in Europe, not to mention bits & pieces of work in Taiwan, Canada, Russia, Germany and others. (although i’ve not been to the last few places lately.)

so on any given day i’ll generally IM with Gen in Tokyo, communicate with folks in Paris, and work on issues related to a few other countries. (not to mention that virtually our whole Mozilla team is in Amsterdam for XTech just now.)

it sort of blows me away, to be honest — i feel really lucky to be doing this sort of work. it’s exposing to a much larger set of issues than i’ve ever been exposed to, and i’m learning a lot quickly.

it’s also amazing to me that such a small company (only about 50 employees — maybe 60 if you add in MozJP & MozEU) has a gigantic global reach and things happening in nearly every corner of the globe.

the travel (paris & tokyo so far) sure beats my reactivity travel


16
May 06

anger shifting.

okay, so while i was angry last week at the president and the NSA about the massive data collection mess. but now i’ve got a couple of other targets:

– i’m angry at the phone companies for selling our information to the spy agency.

– i’m frustrated with the american public, over 60% of whom seem to think that this sort of program as well as the wiretapping program are fine since they think they’ve done nothing wrong. bah. slippery slope. this is a really disappointing position to take — it’s sort of like saying that you don’t mind detention without due process at gitmo as long as you’re not from the middle east.

i think it’s a little damaging to W’s approval rating, but i feel like there should be a national outcry about this. whether it’s legal or not is not really the point for me. (although we should probably get an answer on that eventually.) it’s more about the equivocation and word-mincing and outright lies.