May 30th, 2006
I didn’t write a blog entry yesterday, because it would have been brutally short: 536 miles through the rain, nuthin’ to see. Well, it wasn’t quite that bad: we saw a nice range of snow-capped mountains near Butte, Montana; and a long black line of cattle, marching single-file along a fence by the highway. And [...]
May 28th, 2006
I discovered another benefit of the Internet yesterday, while getting organized for the day’s drive from Banff to Polson, Montana. We had planned to drive past Calgary, and then down through the Waterton Lakes-Glacier National Park area, which straddles the Canadian border. But I vaguely remembered that the high mountain passes in that area are [...]
May 26th, 2006
We got a late start this morning, after waking up to find a steady rain outside. Actually, “late” is a relative term: I got up “late” at 6:30 AM, but David apparently woke so late that he barely had time to wolf down his breakfast before meeting me in the lobby at 10:15 AM.
Not that [...]
May 25th, 2006
We’ve been on the road for some long hours these past few days, and I haven’t had time for daily blog entries. But this will be a somewhat quieter day, up here in the Canadian Rockies, so I’ve got a little time to catch up.
We left Salt Lake City on Monday morning (May 22nd), heading [...]
May 21st, 2006
I’m not sure one should admit that the high spots of a day’s drive through Utah were Starvation State Park and Strawberry Reservoir, but that’s the honest truth. I’m sure there are a lot of great sights in other parts of the state, but they weren’t on our itinerary today.
We left Vernal at 9 AM [...]
May 20th, 2006
There ought to be a law against starting vacations at 6 AM on a Saturday morning; it’s hard to be enthusiastic about anything at that hour in the morning. But when you’re traveling on free plane tickets, your options are often somewhat limited; so my son David and I arrived at LaGuardia at the ungodly [...]
May 13th, 2006
I’ve been mulling over the news of the NSA data-mining operation that’s come to light recently, and wondering whether the grass-roots Internet community will find some way to nullify it. It’s hard to have anything other than vague thoughts about all of this, because I don’t know diddly-squat about the details of how the NSA [...]
May 9th, 2006
This afternoon’s keynote is presented by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the WikiWikiWeb, and a major force in the object-oriented/agile/XP software development world; it’s recursively appropriate that the hyperlink I’ve provided at the beginning of this (long, run-on) sentence is the biographical page on the Wiki encyclopedia.
He began his presentation with a quick overview of [...]
May 9th, 2006
This morning’s keynote presentation is by Siobhan O’Mahony, who worked as a consultant for Price Waterhouse and EDS before joining the faculty of the Harvard Business School. She began by mentioning a theme I heard last week in the ITechLaw conference in San Francisco: there is no one open source model. Choosing the right model [...]
May 8th, 2006
The first keynote presentation at this week’s Cutter Summit conference is on the emerging broadband explosion. After summarizing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat message that more and more knowledge work is being “chunked, routinized, digitized, and automated” — and then moved offshore to countries with much lower labor costs than North America and Western [...]
