Jonah

I had an amusing thought today.  I thought, if America was a ship, shipmates would look upon Bush as a Jonah.  While he may explain away every accusations leveled at him, even he would have to agree that he presided over a lot of bad luck.

Unreasonable?  Yes.  Unfair?  Absolutely.  But what would you do if your ship is half wrecked, stuck in the middle of the ocean without a trace of wind nor passing ships, and running out of food?  Superstitious sailors would toss the Jonah overboard and keep their fingers acrossed.

I have met people who had extraordinary strings of bad luck.  Everything that could go wrong would go wrong.  Car accidents, illness, failing business, ruined reputations and relationships.  Koreans believe bad lucks are brought upon by bad karma.  If you or your ancestors did bad things, bad luck will visit you and your offsprings.

One way to ward off bad luck and ensuring good luck is to find good gravesites for your ancestors and good locations for your home or business.  If your family or business has been suffering a string of bad lucks, bad feng-shui (poong-soo in Korean) is usually suspect.  If it's not feng-shui, then it must be the spirits so a moo-dang (voodoo doctor or channeler of sort) is called to to shoo the bad spirits away.

I doubt many people in Korea still believes this stuff, but the prevailing attitudes are 'what else can we do' and 'why take unnecessary chances?'

Maybe Bush should call in a moo-dang into the White House to see what pissed our founding fathers off.  Heh.

Feeds out of service

FYI, my RSS feeds are out of service temporarily.

It's related to compression and HTTP headers.  For some reason, gzipped feed content is showing up as garbage for some people.  On my desktop, IE can read the feed just fine but not on my laptop.  Turning off compression on the server-side (by massanging metabase.xml) doesn't quite work either because the compressor is slipping in somehow after a while.

Update:

Feeds now seem to be working although IE on my laptop still thinks the feeds are bad.  I think that IE's configuration is screwed up somehow.  Unfortunately, I don't want to reinstall it because that will cause too many annoyances.  Oh, well.

Another problem is that sometimes gzip encoded response is received although gzip is not in the Accept-Encoding.  I have yet to figure out if this is because a proxy is serving up cached copy without honoring Accept-Encoding header or simply IIS behaving erroneously.

Ponzi and Maryam: My New Drinking Buddies

After spending an entire day in geek mode, I wasn't in the mood for more at one of two dinners Microsoft hosted.  Thankfully, Ponzi and Maryam were there to rescued me.  As Ponzi wrote, we had wacky conversations while enjoying wine and cigar.  They are lovely gals with hearts of living gold.  Chris and Robert are lucky to have them as soulmates.

Ali iPod and the Million Thieves

Now that the excitement over Steve Balmer's iPod comment has died down some, I am curious about what people are filling their iPod and iPod-like devices with since iPod can store 10,000 songs.

Are all the iPod users filling up their iPods with purchased songs or songs from their CD collections?  How many of us have 10,000 song music collection?  How long does it take to rip that many songs?

Does 'fair use' allow a user to fill his or her iPod with songs bought by friends and family since all those songs can be borrowed?  What is the reasonable degree of separation for 'fair use'?

Inconvenience of sharing often drives people to buy their own copy but that inconvenience doesn't exist for virtual goods.  Does the law allow simultaneous use of copyrighted goods?

Update:

I just realized that increasing popularity of podcasting means iPods will have two very different types of content: transient and permanent.  As to what implications this might have aside from UI related issues, I have no clue yet.

Technorati Result Quality

I was too tired to attend Technorati Hackathon, so here are some details behind my whining.  20 items in the first page of Technorati search result for my blog consist of:

  • 10 blogroll links (5 duplicates)
  • 2 update link (1 duplicate)
  • 8 post links (4 duplicates)

None of the blogroll links were new and I know when my blog is updated, so only the post links are of interest to me.

Getting 4 items of interest out of 20 is, politely speaking, not bad, but I can't help thinking that Technorati can do better, far better, than what I am currently getting.  I know that there are some underlying fundamental problems that must be solved and that they can't be solved by Technorati alone.  This is why I mentioned the need to ask for help from the community.

Update:

A related problem is Technorati-spamming which I haven't seen done yet but will surely happen.  That problem will be difficult to fix.

The Fourth Leg

So I started using a cellphone again.  I lasted two years without one and had only minor inconveniences.  But when my wife shoved one at me and said Use-It-Or-Else (aka Please), I dropped it into my pocket and went for a walk.  Not Bad.

One of the problems I had with cellphones was that having one in my pocket felt like I had an extra off-center penis with permanent hard-on.  Cellphones have gotten small enough during my sabbatical that it now feels like one after a cold shower.  So I told my wife I'll give it a try.  iPod?  Oy.  It's a long road to there from here.  Let's do it one leg at a time.

Beating and Hanging in Public

This sort of thing occurs regularly on the blogosphere and get worse in numbers and scope as blogosphere expands.  Just as Joi believes that blogosphere is an ideal environment for fostering Emergent Democracy, I believe that blogosphere is an ideal environment for Emergent Chaos.  Echo chamber doesn't begin to describe the terror awaiting us in the future.

In a world where loudness and number matter more than reason, a world where views of distant forests are hidden by nearby dancing trees, growth does not bring wider diversity and deeper understanding but wider polarity and deeper misunderstanding.  The really sad part is that I am one of the savages.

MSN SearchPoint

SearchPoint is the idea I donated to the MSN Search team.  I disseminated it to a handful of individuals across the team hierarchy so I think the chance of it seeing the light of day is fair.  Since I came up with the idea, I don't think it falls under the NDA agreement, but I am not going to discuss it's details for their sake.

Since when did I care about Microsoft?  Frankly, I don't give a hoot about Microsoft.  I do like the MSN Search team though.  They were open in all senses of the word and, although they had some trouble grokking foreign thoughts we threw at them, I found myself caring for now.  Besides, they gave me a nice backpack and an expensive cigar.  Yeah, I am a cheap date.

I will say that the SearchPoint idea has some excellent characteristics such as:

  1. offers substantial benefits to users
  2. offers substantial benefits to websites.
  3. leverages MSN search engine's main strength.
  4. costs little or nothing to implement
  5. dynamic extensibility

#1 means users will see much better search results with minimal effort.  #2 makes SearchPoint viral.  #3 makes it difficult for competitors to replicate SearchPoint.  #4 means SearchPoint will have little impact on the project schedule and resources.  #5 means SearchPoint can be used as a platform to launch other services.

Sorry about the tease but I do enjoy teasing. 😉

BTW, SearchPoint is not a variation of the Search Hats idea although the benefits to the users are similar.

Google Addict

I have grown to dislike Google, the company.  When I am in an unreasonable state of mind, I would even use the word 'hate'.  And I prefer to place the blame on Google, the company, because it's more comfortable there.  While they are great at 'unintended' PR, they have managed to foster hostility against them among geeks over the last couple of years just as Microsoft has done so over the last couple of decades.

Here is a nice takeaway soundbite:

I hate Google, but I am addicted to it.

Can the MSN Search team break my Google addiction?  Not if they keep looking at Google as a service instead of a highly addictive drug.  Google is worse than heroin because it's free and always available.  It's so bad that it's part of my daily language and I often find myself pushing it to family and friends.

You can't beat it unless you offer more powerful kicks.  The mindset that thinks in terms of features and algorithms is incapable of delivering those kicks.  Think designer drugs.  Think habits and addictions.

Read my disclaimer.

Back in the Bay

I got back from Seattle an hour ago.  I'll post about the trip and what I think about MSN Search when my body's gas tank is filled some.

I would like to thank the MSN Event Team though (Britta, Jim, Brenda, etc.).  Britta, in particulary, babysat all of us all the time.  And a big thanks to Sean Carver for throwing the event and making bloggers a significant part of it.  We are a noisy lot and tend to introduce uninvited chaos into any event we attend.  Thanks for putting up with us, Sean.  Although we didn't give what the MSN Search team wanted to hear, I think we gave them what they needed to hear.