Since I read this two book series back-to-back (in about a week and a half — have been home sick), I figure it’s okay to post about both of them together. I first read about Daemon on Joi’s blog, and it sounded interesting enough to give a try.  

[Semi-spoilers below. If you like cyberspace thrillers, you probably want to read these -- and could probably go without the following paragraphs.]

Anyway, I liked them both a lot — probably Daemon a little more than Freedom (TM). They’re sort of a mix between Fight Club and World of Warcraft, with maybe some Blade Runner thrown in — lots of great ideas, lots of real implications of the technologies we all use constantly.

I will say that Daemon is the first novel I’ve ever read that included the syntax for a SQL injection attack on a web site — but maybe that’s just me.

There’s a lot of technical jargon for fiction, and lots of solid ideas about how technology works and what the future could hold — and clearly researched extremely well.

Anyway, they’re a fun couple of books — if you’re wondering what World of Warcraft grafted onto our own everyday world might look like, these are a great place to start. (That particular part gets a lot more pronounced in the second book.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately — obviously because of the developments of eBooks, but also because I’ve been home sick the past few days, reading as I get better, and just generally around all my books more of the time.

I happened to walk by a shelf in our living room filled with books from our family — mostly older books, and mostly from my dad’s mother (she was always “Grandmother” to me). When she died, I inherited a number of her Latin books, since I really loved learning Latin, and it was something that was important to her, too. For whatever reason, I picked one up off the shelf today — Cooper’s Virgil — an annotated collection of the writing of Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, among other things).

Just picking it up, a million different things came up in my mind. Some reverence for how old it is. Fondness for the Latin work and friends I had in high school. Memories of Grandmother, always teaching, and pretty often whipping me in double solitaire, which I’m starting to teach SPL now.

Here’s the back cover page (you can click through to see it bigger):

Now the first thing you’ll notice is that the book is old. It looks like Gussie Raysor acquired it (or just signed it) on May 26, 1895, just about 115 years ago now.

Think of that. 1895 was when the first movie projector was patented. Queen Victoria was still alive, and Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet President of the United States. The Ford Motor Company wouldn’t be founded for another 8 years.

The next thing that I noticed was the name at the top — Laura Lilly — who is definitely not my grandmother, but instead was her sister-in-law — my grandfather’s sister. So that’s a little bit of humor there. I guess my grandfather stole the book from his sister (although I have to say that I can’t really imagine him giving much of a damn about Latin — unless it was some sort of prank, which I can imagine him caring about), and then the book got absorbed into Grandmother’s collection (given her love of language and learning and books, not too surprising). Gussie Raysor was my grandfather’s mother.

And so through this artifact that I’ve moved around several times over the past couple of decades, and that surely frustrated any number of Lillys as they tried to learn their declensions and conjugations and gerunds — through this simple artifact, a connection across the years was made. And with real impact and emotion in the present day.

That is a hell of a thing. It’s just really astonishing in simplicity and power.

Now, I’m not very nostalgic about books, I have to say. I thought I would be — I thought I’d miss their paper & binding shape with the advent of eBooks. But I really don’t — not at all, honestly. I prefer, in most cases, to read books on my Kindle now — which tells me, as I’ve written elsewhere, that what I really love is reading, not the physical forms themselves.

Still:

There’s something about physical artifacts that reaches across the ages. As I look around my own house and think about what objects with meaning will persist and SPL’s grandchildren will look at a hundred years from now, I’m not sure there are very many at all. There are lots of electronic artifacts, like this blog, even, if we can manage to keep them alive and safe from inevitable(?) bit-rot. But precious few things that will make it through the childhoods and moves and marriages and storms and whatever else that the next 100 years will bring.

So I’m glad to have these books of my grandmother’s with me. They mean something and they change who I am and how I experience the world because they’re here with me. And it’s probably time to think a little bit not in the backwards direction, but in the forwards direction, about what we want people to reflect over a hundred years hence.

I think it’s a little too early to really understand the history, and certainly the implications, of the financial crisis that we’ve all been going through over the past 2 years. But I’m quite interested in the actual people who were (and are) involved, and understanding the decisions they made, and as much as I can about how those decisions felt to them.

Sorkin’s book is very useful in that regard — he clearly had outstanding access to most of the important players, and a good sense of the relationships between them. The book is a little bit too long, I think, and reads a little like a breathy soap opera in places, but seems to me that it will be the definitive contemporary accounting of the events of 2007 and 2008, if not the definitive history.

If you’re interested in this subject at all, I’d highly recommend the book — it caused me to have a number of “a ha!” moments and helped my understanding of the system. It’s also created a bit of contempt in me for the bankers and policy makers who were involved — but it’s only one accounting, so I’m inclined to learn a lot more.

I’ve been experimenting with different reading form factors for digital books over the last few weeks — I’ve of course had my various Kindles (Kindlii?) for a couple of years now, and have basically come to love them. I’ve read maybe a hundred books, at least a couple of over a thousand pages, and would not trade it. It is decidedly not a perfect device, and is…what’s the word?…oh, right: ugly. But it gets a lot right for the way that I use it.

But I’ve also been experimenting with reading on my iPhone (via the Kindle app) and on my laptop (again, via the Kindle app) — and I’ve written about some of my early experience in that mode. And when I say “experimenting,” what I mean is that I’ve been reading whole, long form books on it. When I went to Austin a couple of weeks ago, I intentionally didn’t bring my Kindle, preferring to try traveling without it.

And I’ve been trying to read longer chapters and parts of books on my laptop, through the Kindle application for Windows.

So the first conclusion is one that I’ve made before: it’s having your book content in the cloud that really makes the big difference. Being able to read your books on any screen that you happen to have with you is the thing that matters.

But beyond that, I’m finding that I’m a more capable and thoughtful reader when I use the Kindle, as opposed to the other devices. It’s a little hard to explain, but I can maintain a certain stillness and focus when I’m using the Kindle that I haven’t been able to achieve when reading on the iPhone or laptop — I find that on those 2 devices, I’m a little fidgety, and my mind tends to wander towards all the other things I can do on them. My retention isn’t as good as it is when I’m reading on the Kindle itself, and my attention span isn’t as long.

I think there are a few factors here:

• The backlit LED screens just really are not as good for your eyes for reading text. There’s a dynamism to the letters from the lighting, I think, that makes it a little harder for me to focus on the letterforms. And I have this feeling that my eyes get fatigued much more quickly with backlit screens.
• For the iPhone, the screen is just too small to read books without feeling like they have a million pages. So every book feels super long. It’s sort of like reading e-mail on your phone — you always find yourself thinking “holy cow, this is a long note” and then when you look at it on your laptop, you discover it was only a couple of lines.
• For both the iPhone and laptop, I think I have different mental associations about what I do with them — so I found myself switching back and forth between apps quite a lot — which of course took me out of the flow of the book.
• The laptop sucks in all sorts of ways for long form reading. There’s a keyboard between me & the screen, for example. The pixel density isn’t all that great. Just to name a couple.
• The screen on my Kindle is clean. I am pretty fanatical about keeping my Kindle screen free of gunk — I really don’t touch it at all, and am careful about wiping it off when I need to. I’m also a little neurotic (shocking, I know), about keeping my phone (whether iPhone or Nexus One) clean, but there’s always a layer of grime on there, just because I manipulate the UI with my fingers constantly. [New learning: this is doubly gross when you're home sick. Gah.] Even with the extremely cool oleophobic screens that Apple has created, my iPhone is just grimy.
• The last thing is the battery life — I usually don’t leave the wireless on for my Kindle, which results in something like 3 weeks of actual use in battery life. I just don’t ever worry about whether it’ll run out or not. With the iPhone, I can’t usually get more than about 13 hours — so when I fly, I’m jealous about how I use it, and I’ve got battery meters running in my head regarding how to keep it charged.

I’m the first to recognize that I’m not all that typical a reader — the volume of text I consume, whether long form like text, micro form like twitter, or article length like the web, is pretty high. And I read as much for pleasure as I do for work.

But for me, the Kindle is the must-have device for reading, with the iPhone app a very nice-to-have that I use sometimes, and the laptop really as an only occasional use device — it’ll get better when they introduce searching and cataloging, but won’t ever be primary.

Now, I don’t know how that will change, for me, with the advent of the iPad. First off, I’ll very likely get one — this isn’t about that, it’s about whether I’ll read most books on it. I think they’ve done a number of very nice things in the user experience on it, and it looks like a more intimate media device than I’ve ever seen, really.

[As an aside, I noticed a ton of UI elements that seemed bizarre. A wood grain bookshelf actually in the graphics? Showing the pages and the bindings of the books? The spiral tab in the date book? Weird throwbacks to already out-of-date physical forms -- I guess intended to be for the metaphor bridge for the mass market, but still weird.]

It’s a little hard to tell until I get to read longer books on an iPad, but I don’t think it’s going to be the book-reading device for me.

I think it will be exceptional for many other things, and for people who don’t read as many books, or mostly read shorter form material, it’s going to be very worth paying the additional money to get the functionality over the Kindle. In other words, for people for whom reading is an occasional activity, or for just a few minutes a day, I think the iPad and devices like it will be fine.

I have a nagging suspicion that it will continue the erosion of our ability to read long form books, and actually to make long form arguments — with our politics and our marketing and everything else turning into snippets, I think that’s not such a great thing. But I recognize that’s a curmudgeony attitude.

I just get the feeling that the ability to watch movies and listen to music and swipe pictures around, etc etc, on a device that is people’s primary way to also consume books, will mean that the relative time spent reading will go down.

Some other random thoughts:

• It’s good to have more readers in the market — I think that will help everyone.
• I’m very glad they chose a relatively standard format — ePub — that’s a great thing, even though it includes DRM. But I trust the DRM will go away over time.
• Having said that, the extent of a book catalog shows itself very quickly. There’s a huge difference, for real readers, between catalogs that have the bestsellers and more comprehensive ones. The Amazon Kindle catalog is quite comprehensive at this point — I only run into about 1 in every 5 books that I want that I can’t get.
• Pretty disappointed in the connectors on the iPad — am really tired of the iPhone connector, and wish they would move to micro USB like everyone else on the planet.
• I can’t figure out why the early hands-on reviewers thought the virtual keyboard was going to feel great — totally flat keyboards have never felt great. That may not matter, but I thought it was a weird expectation.

Over time, I’d expect the technology in both the Kindle and the iPad to get a lot cheaper — I have a feeling that we may carry around more than one, since they’ll be pretty slim and easy to throw into a bag. But we’ll see.

For now, for me, I’ll keep reading on my Kindle for the foreseeable future, even while swiping around on the iPad for more dynamic content.

[My Mom's health has needed some attention during the period, but I've also had an incredibly hard time kicking a cold and/or flu -- I'll feel good for a day or two, then have a fever and huge congestion for a day or two, very unpredictably. Kathy and SPL are seeing similar sorts of patterns with their own things.]

Anyway, I hate to be so unpredictable, so I’m really sorry if I’ve flaked on you lately — thanks for understanding.

A few thoughts on the comparisons — I think I’m not adding much here that hasn’t already been written:

• The fit & finish of the hardware I like on the Nexus One a little better than on my iPhone — but you should take that with a grain of salt, since my iPhone is more than a year old.
• Nexus One is much faster than my 3G iPhone, which is getting slower and slower with higher latency all the time.
• The web is a much more legitimate first class citizen on Android than on the iPhone — should be no surprise. It’s just more integrated in dozens of ways. Not as totally web native as Palm, but still really good.
• Notifications on Android, and background processes that can fetch data and fire notifications, are much, much better than anything on iPhone. (Except for the inability to have app badges — seems like they should add those soon.)
• And I really like that there are indicator lights — the trackball and the charging light — on the Nexus One to tell you things without needing to unlock the phone.
• The virtual keyboard on Android has some good advances, but ultimately doesn’t enable the quick accuracy of the iPhone — I think the iPhone is messing with hit targets as you type, depending on the likelihood for each letter — and it helps tremendously.
• I’m no longer really worried about the lack of applications on Android — it seems very clear that everyone will start writing apps for both iPhone and Android as first tier platforms — but I am a little concerned about the quality of the app experience on Android — the apps just don’t feel like they’re put together nearly as well. It seems like they can access more of the operating system than iPhone apps can, so they should ultimately be more compelling, but the user experience just is very inconsistent at best, and really awful at worst. This is clearly due to the SDK for each OS — Apple’s SDK just seems to allow developers to put together applications that feel better overall. This is just one area where the battle feels a lot like we’re repeating history with an Apple platform versus a more open platform.
• Google Voice on the Nexus one is a fantastic experience. It’s very clear that traditional telephony is walking dead.

At the end of the day, though, my iPhone experience is just more intimate than my Android experience — it feels more like it has my life on it, while the Android just feels like a very good phone and mobile web device. It’s just easier to get more of what I care about — my pictures, my music, my movies, games I like, and all my books (via the Kindle app) on my iPhone. So it feels more like an integrated part of my life than the Android. As frustrated as I am with my current iPhone 3G because of battery life & sluggishness & general physical-falling-apart, I still feel better when I have it than an Android.

So I’m encouraged by the advances of Android & the Nexus One — and fully expect that the huge array of players in the ecosystem will push things forward more quickly now — ultimately, we as consumers really need a platform for our mobile lives that’s an alternative to Cupertino — not because of what Apple is per se, but because multiple choices means that everyone has to get better.

You’ll recall that the last straw for me was that the Zeo wasn’t registering periods of wakefulness that I knew were happening — 5 or 10 minutes at a time — so that undermined my faith it it. Shambroom said that, counter-intuitively, determining wake state is actually harder than telling the difference between light sleep, deep sleep, and REM — the brain waves (or whatever) just aren’t really differentiated enough from light sleep. So periods of wakefulness are a weak point in the system.

We talked for a while about the implications of that — and ultimately I came to this understanding: my relationship with sleep is a pretty emotional one, and often intensely frustrating. What I mean when I say that is that because I’ve had trouble sleeping my whole life — with both apnea and insomnia issues — and it’s such a hard problem to debug properly, combined with the fact that when I can’t sleep I’m always tired & cranky — that all adds up to a lot of emotional context when trying to figure out my sleep. And in particular, the parts when I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep are the most obviously frustrating, since I’m asleep during the other times.

And so when you take the fact that the Zeo fell down on tracking a scientifically not-that-interesting issue (short periods of wakefulness), but highly emotionally charged one (can’t sleep!), that adds up to a perception problem (at least) for Zeo. They’re working on it, though, and I’m encouraged that they’re really trying to get this better as they go.

I was really happy for them to reach out to me to understand my own situation, and was really happy with their followups after the call (they sent me some research that may help me understand some things better).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next improvement from them, and my overall experience so far has been pretty good.

But the thing that I’m struggling with the most is calendar. The built-in calendar is really mostly built for Google Calendar, although I think it can subscribe (but not edit or publish) to .ics files. So that’s great if you’re using Google Calendar, not so much if you’re using anything else.

Here at Mozilla, we run Zimbra for mail, calendar, messaging, etc. With my iPhone, I just set up the CalDAV account, and it works great.

With my Android phone, so far best solution is to use the 3rd party app TouchDown, but I don’t love it — for all the reasons you’d imagine not loving a 3rd party Exchange client.

So I’m willing to jump through a couple of hoops here — syncing Zimbra with GCal maybe? — but am a little stumped on what the best thing to do is. My calendar essentially runs my life — without it, it’s going to be hard to live with the Android.

• Zeo followups
• Moving blog to wordpress.com? (would lose the widgets on the RHS though)
• Christmas through a 4-year-old’s eyes and other thoughts on the nature of time and being in the moment
• Thoughts on using Android on the Nexus One
• Some reactions to location-based apps like Gowalla, 4square, etc.

And then a bunch of stuff I’m reading. Too Big To Fail is great, but also sorta too long to read. About 1/2way through. The new Lethem I’m really struggling to get through. A little too inside NYC.

Douglas Coupland is one of my most enduring favorite authors, along with Jonathan Lethem and Haruki Murakami and Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve found him to be the voice of my generation many times — even including when he popularized the term “Generation X” for my generation — in the title of his 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

Looking back now, from 2010, it’s clear that while we felt like life was accelerated in 1991, we had no idea how much faster culture and life would get — that we’d see the fundamental innovation of the web start to take hold just a few years later, and the rate of change would just get faster and faster and faster.

Coupland’s themes have always really spoken to me — he writes about the struggles we all go through to make meaning of our lives — in his book Life After God, he explores the idea that in the past, in America, that religion and the church was the main organizing principle — the connective tissue between events & moments that ultimately shapes all of it into something coherent. But that religion, for many Gen Xers, has lost that narrative power — and so we’re all searching around for something else to take its place.

The answer, naturally, has to be that nothing can take it’s place, and finding meaning in your life was never really connected purely to religion anyway — but the structure of activity and thought that religion brought made it a little easier. Finding meaning — rather, making meaning — is more intrinsic than that; it has to come from within yourself.

But I’ve been having a hard time with Coupland’s last few books — they’ve been harder for me to believe & internalize — they’re just a little more random and less accessible than I found his writing before. Or it may be that as he — and I, and all of Generation X — gets older that the ideas of alienation and narrative and meaning are getting harder to think about, harder to see — so you have to just tell stories to try to get a glimpse at their truths.

I liked this book; it’s a little quirkier than I was hoping for, and I can’t tell yet what meaning to make from it — but think I may come back to it in a year or two to consider it again. (And it’s already caused me to pick up Life After God again.)

I’ve got a huge interest in the history of Ancient Rome, and Everitt has written 2 of my favorite books on the subject: biographies of Cicero and Augustus. Now he adds this one about the emperor Hadrian, who ruled about a century after Augustus established the empire (which was about 50 years after Cicero was at the height of his oratorical powers).

While I liked his earlier 2 books better, I really enjoyed this one, too, and it was made more real because I took my first trip to Rome in November, while I was in the middle of reading it. Hadrian was directly responsible for the rebuilding of the Pantheon, the most incredible building that I saw on our trip — and he came at a time just after the Flavians (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian), who reformed the city by building the Colosseum and much on the Palatine (not to mention, you know, the whole destruction of Jerusalem in there by Titus), and Trajan, who was as expansionist as any Roman emperor.

The time that Everitt chronicles in these 3 books is really an amazing time in Roman (and world) history — Rome was at the height of its power and influence — after Hadrian, things were mostly in decline.

Anyway, a must-read for anyone interested in Roman history (and if you are, let me know, because I’ve got a few others).

1. First & foremost, I treat my email as (probably my most important) work queue. (although that’s both work and professional.) I don’t really use it at all for information sources, etc.
2. No bug mail of note goes into my e-mail. That’s not really a decision so much as a responsibilities thing. but i think the volume of bugmail is so brutal that it’s an e-mail destroyer. (So if I had to get a lot of it, I would segment into a different account.)
3. I’m on basically zero mailing lists — have other ways of reading that stuff.
4. I try really hard to get my inbox to less than 20 messages before i leave each day; and 10 before I go to bed. Happens most of the time. I’m sitting on 6 messages in my inbox now, for example. Staying on top of things is *way* easier than getting on top.
5. Any message that I can respond to quickly, I do, and then throw it away. I do that a lot on my iPhone, as I walk between meetings, wait for my lunch appointment to show up, whatever.
6. If something is in my box that’s going to take a while to get sorted out, I file it and move the task to my Things list.
7. Also, if it’s going to take a few days to get back to someone, I generally send them a note to that effect — that I’ll get back to them. and sometimes, especially when I’m doing a favor for someone, I send a note that says “if you don’t hear from me by Tuesday, send me a note”
8. I try really hard to respond to everyone — either the content of what they want, or the message that it’ll be a while — during the same day — don’t always get that done, but mostly. Generally, my inbox is a bunch of messages from “Today”, a handful from “Yesterday” and some that have actual dates on them. If I note the dated ones getting too long ago, I generally think about how to make traction on them. (There’s some core of ~3-4 messages that are on longer-running topics that sometimes I’m comfortable to just leave there since I know I’ll get to them by the weekend.

An observation I’ve had lately: I’m getting less mail than I used to. More is happening on twitter, IM, etc.

It’s that combo of stuff that I do. I now pretty much don’t file things away, either — I put them either into “FileToKeep” (which I keep for a long time) or (mostly) into “FileToTrash” (which I clean out so that I only have 3 months of past mail in it).

I think the critical things are: (1) treating it purely as a work queue (and getting off every other mailing, or separating to another account, like bugmail), (2) having a discipline about quickly giving *some* response, (3) moving long running tasks to a task list and (4) getting it very close to zero when you start, as I think it’s difficult to whittle down over time (I’ve seen a lot of inboxes with thousands of messages in them — don’t know how you can do anything with those.)

That’s what I do. You?

Fantastic book; loved all of it. It’s a history about the early 1500s, when Charles V and Clement VII and Henry VIII and Francis I dominated the European landscape, and Suleyman the Magnificent ruled in the East. Reston’s done a fantastic job weaving together geographically dispersed but thematically very related activities, and I found it riveting.

And, actually, the best of the 5 books he considers a cycle looking at the conflict between Christianity and Islam (and eventually between Christianity and science). It started with The Last Apocalypse, about the time period around 1000 AD, then the 3rd Crusade (Warriors of God), continued by looking at the Christian conquest of Spain (Dogs of War), through Defenders of the Faith, and concluding with Galileo: A Life.

At least Reston includes Galileo in his conception of the cycle — I found it quite different in character than the other 4.

But all 5 books are highly recommended — among my favorite histories.

I’ve wanted to visit Rome for a long time — since high school when I learned about it in Mr. Thompson’s Latin class, really. But I’d never been — there aren’t a ton of reasons to get there for work, and I’d never been on holiday either.

But a couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to go for a few days of vacation there, prior to a visit to our Paris office and attending the Monaco Media Forum. Thanks to my mom being kind enough to visit, Kathy was able to go as well, so we got to spend a fantastic 4 days together exploring Rome.

I have a lot of different reactions to Rome — but the main one is that it feels like 4 or 5 different, distinct cities that all happen to be located in the same place. There’s Ancient Rome, of course, and Catholic Rome (and the Vatican) — and Renaissance Rome (including the home of the Medicis) and modern, International Rome. These are all related to each other, naturally (for example, the Popes underwrote much of the Renaissance work) — but just felt really distinct to me — a little more than I expected. (There are also some interesting monuments to Italian nationalism built earlier in the 20th century, celebrating people like Vittorio Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy.)

In some parts of Rome, the various periods collide in interesting ways — the Pantheon, for example, has functioned more or less continuously since being built by Agrippa in the first century BC (and then rebuilt in the 2nd century AD) — it’s now a Catholic church, but also is where Vittorio Emmanuel is buried, not to mention Raphael — and is of course, despite being nearly 2,000 years old, the largest concrete dome in the world.

I found the Pantheon to be incredible — there’s something about the proportions of the building that make it feel incredibly stable — there’s a rightness to it that’s incredibly compelling. (I think the iconic status of the place plays into that, but it’s not just that.)

And the Roman Forum and the structures of the emperors on the Palatine hill were amazing, of course. There’s something about being able to walk through the forum, to walk through Domus Augustana (the villa that the Flavians built), and just try to imagine what it looked like, what it felt like, how life must have been. I’d always heard the aphorism: “Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble,” but not really internalized what that meant — as you walk around the Palatine & the Forum, you get a sense — many of the buildings have small holes in them — where the metal hooks had been that had previously held the marble facing for buildings (and that metal was eventually melted down to make ammunition, centuries later, naturally).

The permanence of the ancient buildings is astounding, and — especially taken with the incredible Colosseum, and the remnants of the aqueducts nearby — really hammers home the point that this civilization, for all its obvious faults, really knew what it was doing. Their level of building, planning, administration, and just general control of civic life was unprecedented, and incredible.

Of course, the next question you’re faced with is this: what the hell happened? We know, of course, with hindsight that what happened was invaders from the North, and the middle/dark ages, and the plague, and a shift of power to Constantinople in the East. But, really, it took a thousand years after the fall of Rome to start to approach the level of competence of the Romans again.

What a remarkable thing. I think most of us think of history as a more or less one direction proposition: progress. (We can debate for a while whether, you know, tending to virtual fish & farms is, strictly speaking, but you know what I mean.) And maybe the progress is of a technological sort, or maybe it’s geographic, moving from civilization to civilization.

But you never think the whole world (give or take) will take a gigantic, centuries-long, step backwards. We all read about it in school, of course, and understand it intellectually, but being there, seeing it and thinking about it just left me breathless.

Anyway. Fantastic trip; hope to get back to see more than just Rome, and spend more time in the city itself, too. Will hold onto my camera better next time, too.

I’ve put up a set of pictures of Rome, plus out the window from my hotel room in Monte Carlo, up on Flickr. (Taken with our smaller Lumix LX-3 camera, which is fantastic.)

As I blogged a bit ago, I recently picked up a Zeo — it’s a sleep monitor for tracking states of sleep each night. Ive always had trouble sleeping and so have a bit of a fascination with understanding sleep and how it affects me personally.

After about 30 days, I’ve decided to return it, because I have suspicions that the data collection isn’t very accurate. I woke up several times each night — times that I was alert enough to get out of bed, walk to the bathroom and back, and then eventually go back to sleep — but the Zeo didn’t seem to register those periods of wakefulness. There are some disclaimers that it doesn’t trigger for periods of less than 2 minutes, which I understand, but these were more than that. The waking periods aren’t such a big deal — obviously I don’t really need to track them since I’m awake & alert enough to manually note them. But the fact that the unit wasn’t tracking them correctly made me feel like the rest of the data was suspect as well.

So I sent it back today — I’m really disappointed. I’m optimistic, though, about both the Zeo company and the future of sleep sensors (and really a huge variety of biometric sensors). The product design and execution of the unit were both outstanding, and the way it integrates with an online coaching system is excellent. (The chart above is actually a chart I generated myself in Numbers with the CSV export of my sleep data.)

I loved the product, loved the way it made me mindful of sleep patterns & factors that affect it — just didn’t trust the data, ultimately, so felt sort of silly to keep it.

A fun, quick read — sort of science fiction but could be present day — an alternate reality where we’re all super-associated with where we work (taking as last names the name of the company), everything is super-privatized and corporate.

I really love reading Klosterman’s essays, and this is a great collection, as always. Includes essays on:

• the similarities between David Koresh & Kurt Cobain
• the impossibility (and merits) of time travel — only real reason to do it is if you want to have dinosaur for dinner)
• the way the public reacts to high profile failures like Ralph Samson
• a polemic against laugh tracks
• and then lots of stuff about Abba, as per normal for Klosterman

Great, fun, smart book, and insightful about our modern media culture.

The story of this trilogy is a peculiar one — Larsson meant for the series to be longer — something like 10 books — but he died of a heart attack in 2004, after completing only the first 3 and parts of the 4th (in Swedish). He was quite an activist in Sweden, and there are personal influences pretty clearly in his characters.

I liked the first book a lot — it was really a locked room mystery — very fun. The second book centered more on a type of espionage. The third book, which isn’t yet published in the US (but is in the UK, which is where my edition came from), wraps up a lot of loose ends, but I found it a little bit boring. Lots of basic police work, lots of courtroom dialog. Satisfying as a way to wrap things up, but not as intense as the first book or as wide open as the second.

1. In general, the Net has been neutral for the really explosive innovation phase over the last 15 years or so. Much of what’s being proposed is about protecting that.

2. There’s good experience & real data from around the world that supports neutrality as we move from the first phase of broadband rollout to the next. If you have the time, I highly encourage you to read the FCC-commissioned Broadband Study from the Berkman Center (with Yochai Benkler as Primary Investigator) [PDF link]. There’s actual data in it (a lot of it) and worldwide experience that we can use to develop our own policy.

3. Making sure that the mobile Internet is as open as the wired Internet has been is crucial. We need 1 global Internet, not a collection of non-open ones.

Beyond all that, it’s worth taking the time to read the Chairman’s speech of a couple of weeks back. It’s a fantastic and inspirational speech.

Hornby’s writing is incredibly charming, as always, and that helped the book move along, but I never felt very much affinity for the characters, so the book fell a little flat for me.