Rodent Regatta

Ralston Holcombe had no visible neck, but his chin took care of that. — from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

The best television show of the new season won’t be decided for several more weeks—except for me. Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip has already won my loyalty. Aaron Sorkin’s writing of dialog has simply soared since he last wrote for Sports Night and The West Wing.

In something shy of two minutes last night, we caught a glimpse of the creative process required to fill ninety minutes of air time with a live television broadcast. The two minutes illustrated the breaking of a writer’s block and the sudden flood of inspiration that essentially developed the rest of the show.

The episode was called The Cold Open, and it indicated Sorkin’s respect for the intelligence of television viewers. He doesn’t waste our time and he doesn’t coddle. Listen and watch carefully and he’ll reward you with some of the finest dialog and actors that television has ever offered. Try to multitask with the TV as background noise and Sorkin’s work will be lost on you.

Teamwork, collaboration, chaos and deadlines were depicted as realistically last night as in any television show I’ve ever watched. Whether you wrestle with collaborative work among scattered people, or spend time considering the intrinsic business value of NBC as compared to Google, this show has something for you. It’s entertainment. It’s TV about TV. It’s metaphor. It’s full of lessons for anyone who feels challenged by the ways and means of today’s work place.

Since January of 2002 this weblog has accumulated 4683 entries, posts, essays or articles. The terminology varies depending upon who you talk to about weblogs.

With some design improvements and structural changes expected in the next few months, it was time to review those articles and make some decisions. Interesting by-products resulted:

Read on...

What a quote:

So that’s why I said nothing yesterday; I was filled with the dark corrosive ichor that comes when even your hobbies disappoint. The Bleat by James Lileks on March 17, 2006.

Been there. Frequently. Lately.

I’m visiting too many sites that expect me to make the switch now from reading to listening. There are problems with that. First, the behavior of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer and QuickTime on a Windows PC is highly variable from one PC to the next. Get them all together on a single machine and you’re simply begging to watch the turf wars as they fight it out for control of your PC. Take a look at that URL and imagine yourself trying to jot it down…Second, there remains a lot of variability from one day to the next in what passes for broadband in this country. [Hint: 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up isn’t broadband except in the marketing suites of America’s ISP’s.]

Finally, if you’ve got a well-behaved and properly-configured PC and your bandwidth is working just fine, you still lose something when a link-filled weblog entry becomes a podcast. For now, there are places where traditional entries and podcasts coexist very well. However, and strictly as an example, 43 Folders is also a shining example of a site where going all-podcast-all-the-time wouldn’t work. There is too much information there that is right-brained—you simply have to see it to fully grasp how you might use it. Take a look at that URL and imagine yourself trying to jot it down or type it in while listening to a podcast.

Meanwhile, back at the Rat Race—we’ll add podcasting here when 100Mbps up and down is the rule rather than the exception. By that time a podcast will be all-video-all-the-time complete with a clickable whiteboard showing the links as the podcaster talks. Then, I’m in.