There’s a freedom with free software—customizations, etc. But you are also enslaving yourself to the upkeep. If you’re not committed to that, then don’t do it.

[And I let people pay me to keep up with WP installations. It pays for a server that I lease that lets me do lots of wacky things for free.]

So now on gfmorris.net, I’m using YOURLS. If you see a link from me that’s http://gfmorris.net/urls/[something], it’s generated by YOURLS.

What kind of things am I linking to? Well, lots of things, but … usually, goalie fights.

I could watch goalie fights all day long…

Gosh, I R SMRT.

GAAAAAAAH! UPDATE, DAMMIT!

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

I think my favorite thing is how Stephen just matter-of-factly points to Baio’s entry, too … me, I wouldn’t have been able to resist discussing how I would be freaking out if internal emails were getting posted on the Internet. Of course, I realized long ago that I was only one forward away from any of my emails being read by the one person I least wanted to see them, privacy disclaimers I might make to the contrary.

An aside, because I think it’s worth considering: email from 25 years ago was far more likely to be for-the-record, memo-style stuff than what you typically see today in business. There certainly was a lot less of it sent [as we were less used to it as a communication medium], and so everything was more focused—and, sometimes, strident. I think this accounts for some of the tone you see in some of the emails that Andy reproduced, and I think the following quotation makes my point:

I just wanted to clarify in writing what we discussed about “Restaurant” last Tuesday — what I will and will not agree to.

I will not sign a blank sheet of paper: I refuse to take responsibility for “Restaurant” in the state it presently is in — not knowing who is creatively in charge, how much thinking has actually been done, or how much of a script is written. …

– Amy Briggs

Consider the difference between this opening and most of the business email you send and receive. Do you write stuff like this from time to time? Sure, we all do. But those are the emails that we stay after hours to write—or, better, sleep on and write first thing the next morning. But it would be a mistake to not recognize that many of these emails were of a for-the-record nature, the kinds of things that make positional statements, and as such sound more assertive than we’re used to.

Made me realize that, other than incumbent Sandy Kirkindall, I had no idea who was even running for mayor, and I have no idea what any of them really stand for. Oh, there’s Finley’s “A Fresh Approach”, and I’m sure that Kirkindall’s slogan will be “Proven Leadership” like any good incumbent. But it occurs to me that I maybe should get involved and blog about this, because it means something to us here in the L:35758.

Would this be interesting to any of the locals?

When you perform
It’s so intense
When the critics pan
I write in your defense

I understand I am just a fan
I’m just a fan

Wilco, “The Lonely 1“, Being There

Andrew wrote about going to see Sixpence None the Richer play on Sunday night in Nashville, and a good chunk of what he wrote resonated with me.

I’ve lived here for eleven years and I’ve had the real honor of working with just about everybody I listened to in high school who’s not dead or in U2, Pink Floyd or the Beatles. It’s shocking and amazing at first, but it wears off and you realize they’re just dudes like you, and the magic fades away a little bit.

Except for this band Sixpence. I don’t care. I just freaking love them. They’re one of my favorites. They always have been and they always will be. I’ve played a few things with Matt, mostly at Andy P’s Christmas shows, and Leigh sang on the first Normals record. But somehow, they never faded to me. I’m a fan. And I love it.

Despite it all, Caedmon’s Call is still that way for me. [Derek or Andy solo? Not so much. Both of those are very much old hat, to the point that if either asked me to sing BGVs or something during a show, I wouldn't be intimidated.] Every show is still pretty special for me, because the music takes me back to a far more formative period of my life. I connect to it in ways that really only I know about, because I’ve never talked about with anyone in the band. [Unlike, say, some of Andrew's stuff.]

Another thing I want to note here: I try to maintain a certain distance with Over the Rhine. I freaking love them, and while I guess there are chances for me to get to know them—and they’re certainly inviting of those opportunities—I really just want to remain a fan. Unlike most of the shows of bands I attend whenever they’re in my area, I go to those shows, make my recording, take my photos, and go the hell home. No waiting for two hours after the show to talk to the band [because we want to talk to each other, but I'm willing to wait out the other fans] or anything. I just watch the show, capture it, go home, and revel in the remembrance later. I like that.

I think I set the trend with OtR when, at the first show I attended, Rick and I sat right along the walkway from the green room to the stage. Didn’t talk to them then … probably won’t in the future.

Advocates of NASA’s plan to return to the moon are concerned that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he will raid NASA’s budget to fund education. While the issue of space exploration hasn’t gotten much attention this campaign season, it is a topic on which the candidates do differ.

Raiding NASA’s budget to fund education is like sponsoring the US Olympic Team but then not sending them to Beijing this summer. Admittedly, I’m quite biased as someone who works in manned spaceflight, but space science is one of the few endeavors that mankind has left that is, on the whole, quite positive. Sure, there are negatives—one reason NASA will continue to get funding is fear over the Chinese space program, and the International Space Station largely has justified a jobs program to keep Russian rocket scientists from going to work for Iran, North Korea, and China—but that we’ve gotten the world’s nations to push together for this quite lofty goal is impressive. That we won’t let the Chinese be a part is sad, to be sure, but that’s something that talk-with-your-enemies Obama would support, right?

When I posted about voting in Alabama’s primaries last month, I was leaning Obama. Hillary’s desperate tactics in the face of Obamamania have pushed me further in his direction. But just as I did in 2004, I’ll vote with my job, even if that’s “fucking idiotic” to some. Admittedly, part of the reason that I like both Obama and McCain is that they don’t seem to fall into the “you’re stupid because you disagree with me” argument. I’m fairly convinced that either candidate would make a good President; I hope you’ll understand why I’m likely to make the choice to vote with my job.

[I mean, I guess that, now that I'm management, my skills are portable, but ... I do kinda like this shit. I mean, I did get one of NASA's highest honors last year. ]

Link the first: Bemidji State and WCHA announce scheduling agreement:

Bemidji State hopes to play an annual 12-game, non-conference schedule against members of the WCHA with an even split of home and road contests. However, no specific details regarding the scheduling agreement have been finalized at this time.

“The WCHA congratulates the City of Bemidji and Bemidji State University on their commitment to build a new ice hockey facility,” WCHA officials said in a statement released Friday. “[The WCHA] looks forward to helping showcase the sport at the highest level to the citizens of Bemidji, Minn.”

[Emphasis mine.]

That’s the key thing: BSU gets WCHA home games. They’ve had some, but not enough.

For those who don’t know: BSU’s current conference is that of my alma mater, Alabama-Huntsville. Our league has a team in northern Minnesota [BSU], north Alabama, Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Ummmmm … we’re not exactly centrally located. The Detroit team folds at the end of the season, meaning that no team is within an afternoon’s drive of the other. [You could do Det-Pitt okay, or Det-Niagara if you went through Canada.] The WCHA, rather, has several teams in the state of Minnesota, plus North Dakota [a few hours from Bemidji], Wisconsin, Michigan Tech, two schools on the Front Range, and Alaska. Only the last three would be fly dates for Bemidji, whereas all four of our schools are for them.

Why not just accept them into the WCHA formally? Well, the WCHA doesn’t want to kill our league, College Hockey America, because it’s the only easy place for western schools to expand into. Of course, being a geographic hodgepodge has made it hard for teams to stick in the league because of the travel costs. That’s a function of western collegiate hockey, though; when “west” starts somewhere around Harrisburg, PA, yeah, you’ve got bigger geographic problems in the west.

I think the only way for the CHA to be a viable conference is for the WCHA and the CCHA to sign scheduling agreements with all our member schools. Bemidji has been a natural fit for WCHA schools because of proximity. If the two big western conferences are serious about western expansion, well, they’ve got to give us games with their teams in our barns to make us viable. Why does that make us viable? It’s not so much us as other teams that might come up—you’ll get a lot more push to go varsity at Penn State, or Illinois, or whoever if you know you can get Michigan or Wisconsin or Denver to come to your barn every so often.

Link the second: Merlin Mann’s feeling that .Mac is a future sleeping giant:

Think about it: a new lightweight laptop with a small hard drive; an iPhone that’s getting dangerously close to becoming a remote for your home and life; an Apple TV that doesn’t even require a computer; an iPod Touch that (rather mysteriously) now needs your credit card info and a login to get new apps onto the device. Then, fold in a couple big spoonfuls of the company’s clearly increasing interest in becoming the people who sell or rent you the entertainment media that goes on all the machines you bought from them. I dunno.

I suppose it’s my (still congealing) contention that right now, Apple deliberately keeps .Mac a dim-witted, sleeping giant. It’s so unsexy, broken, and behind-the-times right now as to seem like a product out of a less forward-thinking company.

But what happens when that giant wakes up, stretches, and then starts standing in the middle of every single product Apple (and its partners) have to sell? It’s so mind-boggling to consider the implications, especially given that it stands as one of the few persuasive explanations for why such a smart company would stay so quiet for so long about allowing a premium pay service go to seed this badly.

I think something is up. Big time.

I think it’s wishcasting, but that’s because I’m condition to think that .Mac is always going to disappoint us. It could totally rock, but it never seems to rock. [I think it just solidifies the fact that Apple is a hardware company first and foremost; running this service is out of its core competency.]

Link the third: Merlin on the Amazon Gift Organizer:

Now, the cool part of all this — even if you don’t use Amazon very much — is that Amazon.com is friggin huge. Which means that they (or their “Marketplace” partners) carry a ridiculously high percentage of the purchasable, shippable items available in the consumer universe. So, if you start using the Gift Organizer today — even for stuff you have no intention of buying from Amazon — your life is going to be much easier the next time a gift-giving occasion rolls around; you’ve capitalized on several months of passive, half-assed attention to actually do something useful.

Absofuckinlutely.

[And not just because he used the term "Amazon Prime dork", because ... hello. I am one.]

First: it took me a while to get into it, but I freakin’ love Upcoming. If nothing else, it’s a way for me to point where I’m going to be. I began professing my love for Upcoming about a year ago, and Andy taking a personal interest in my issues really helped me come to love it more. I use it a lot, if for nothing else than tour data publishing for Andy Osenga, Caedmon’s Call, Derek Webb, and the rest of the Square Peg Alliance. In fact, were I in my own band, I would totally leverage Upcoming to announce all my tour dates. So, all that Andy did to build Upcoming … well, dude, thank you. You rock.

Second: as Andy notes, Waxy.org took a nosedive when he started Upcoming and it really gathered steam:

In case you haven’t noticed, Waxy.org went into cryogenic sleep shortly after we were acquired as all my energy went into building and growing Upcoming. I’ve missed writing and coding here badly, so I’m thrilled to make a second announcement:

Next year, I’m focusing exclusively on Waxy.org and related coding projects. What does that mean? Yes, more links, but also the same flavor of original research and investigative journalism I’ve done in the past, though on a daily basis instead of the quarterly (ack!) schedule I maintained this year.

I’m going to be taking some time off for the rest of the year to travel and get things in order (e.g. I’m long due for a redesign), so don’t expect things to really get moving until the first week of January. Stay tuned to the feed for details.

Let’s put it this way: there are few Weblogs I read where I stop everything I’m doing, shut down all my continuous partial attention devices, and focus on the writing. Rands in Repose is one; Waxy is another. Examplia gratis: Waxy on sex baiting on Craigslist.

So Andy: thanks. Rest up. Cheers. I owe you several beers on general principles.

So I’m gonna try to leave you better context more often. I’ll probably fail; I mean, I do crappy entries like 20 Oct’s pretty often. But hey, I write for an audience that is larger than myself and Mom [hi, Mom!], so I owe it to you to leave more context. And maybe I can guilt Alex into reviving the fine context that made Around the web a must-read, even if it’s slipped a bit lately. [I know, dude, I know. Huge glass house I have here.]

And if I don’t, you can totally give me crap about it. And I will take it, and I will eat my words. Lotsa practice.

Fred Wilson argues, “No conflict, no interest.” I think that’s right. I think journalism had this ethos of the disinterested observer at a time when it was needed to gain credibility amongst the readership. But to be honest, unless the journalist is an excellent writer, the disinterested observer’s explication of the situation is often dreadfully boring.

Storytelling matters. Documentary is a great thing, but few are compelling enough to grab mass attention. It’s far more often the biopic that tantalizes and interests. And once you have people interested, they’re gonna be more likely to do their own study. [Some folks just won't; they either feel inadequate or disinclined. Their loss.]

Conversely, the writing of an interested observer can be worthwhile, but you must know the observer’s leanings to fully understand. If I write about manned spaceflight, well, y’all know that I work in it. I quite clearly have a vested interest in the continuance of it for fiscal reasons, but because I care about it—I could make more money on the outside, I assure you!—I also have a passion that, I hope, can be infectious about it.

[And yet I'm aware that I work for a conservative organization that may not react well to me openly blogging my every last opinion on manned spaceflight, which is one reason that I've been quiet about many things here. Just get me in a room and wind me up ... ]

So yes, interested observers with a dog in the fight do have plenty to say. They’re usually more interesting than your dispassionate observer—who rarely exists, anyway. Give me the bias…

Today’s Washington Post has an anecdotal story about the failure of No Child Left Behind to force any improvements at tiny Como Elementary in Como, Miss., a school that has been the state’s worst at a time when Mississippi is coming in last in standardized testing. [Dangit, what happened to "Thank God for Arkansas"?!] The story discusses all what you’d expect: those who can afford it have gone to the local private school, a common occurrence in Mississippi that’s created separate and unequal [although my experience with most of these private rural academies is that they're worse at teaching than the public schools]; the difficulty of bringing in teachers, leading to Como taking on faculty generally considered unqualified or incapable by other districts; and the general issues of getting lost in the system. Most days, I would have read this, shaken my head slowly, and said, “Yeah, NCLB didn’t make much inroads, and it’s made a lot of things worse.”

But as I was in the airport yesterday, I read “How to be top” in the 20 Oct 2007 issue of The Economist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies what makes education actually tick:

Are students well prepared for future challenges? Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) answers these questions and more, through its surveys of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries. Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. The results of the PISA 2006 survey will be released on 4 December 2007.

–OECD.org, 28 Oct 2007

There are many things that make other countries’ educational systems perform well, but how they do recruiting is, to me, one of the most important:

In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

I have friends who are teachers or are studying to be them: Adam, Jeremy’s wife Hallie, Brian, and Kari’s husband Mike. All of them are smart folks who have chosen teaching over other careers where they could make more money or have more prestige. That said, I don’t think that any of them would feel that there was much competition for them to get into their educational coursework. At many universities, including my alma mater, the education department is the 90-pound weakling; as an engineering major, I arrogantly considered most of my liberal arts peers to be slacker punks, but I at least knew that the kids majoring in English or history or whatever were working their asses off. It never felt like the education majors were pushed all that hard, and it was widely known at UAH that education majors had the lowest average incoming ACT and SAT test scores.

And sure, we all know an Adam, a Hallie, a Brian, a Mike—a smart, dedicated student who chose education. But are those folks the norm? The statistics nationwide say that they aren’t. Why is education not considered a high-prestige major at UAH, where nursing is? I’ll argue along with the PISA folks and McKinsey: at UAH, nursing is a selective major. The upper division slots are limited—more folks are trying to get into them than spots exist. Do nurses make more money than teachers—certainly they do. But at UAH, nursing majors were respected because there was competition; conversely, education as a major seemed like a last resort, the degree you got if you weren’t smart or hard-working enough to stick in some other major. Sure, we all know the smart folks who choose to become educators, but they feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

Smart students today in America have a lot of educational and vocational possibilities. Medicine is still considered an ideal, despite the hours and workload, despite the time commitment of medical school, internship, and residency. Even in a time when our nation needs desparately needs more doctors, our nation’s medical schools refuse to lower their standards; instead, we import top talent from South Asia. The statistical evidence of other nations, as taken by PISA, would argue that we might see the same network effects if education suddenly became a difficult school to get into. Just as with highly-selective educational institutions themselves, smart kids seek the selective places not because they’re demonstrably better than anyplace else—most studies show that undergraduate education is generally good at most any nationally-recognized university—but the best of the best want to go to the toughest places not only because they are good, but because there is prestige merely in making it there. Education doesn’t have that cachet these days, and so I believe that smart students generally pass it by in favor of more prestigious, challenging, and lucrative prospects.

[And hey, I'm one of these people that argues that it's not all about the money. I could make a lot more money in middle management in fully private industry than I do working as a government contractor. But dadgummit, there just aren't that many people who get to put stuff into space, either.]

Simply put, I can upload a list of my e-mail contacts to be bounced against their database of registered users and they will tell me who among my contacts are already users of their service. This feature allows me to jump-start the creation of my personal network of users of the service. Some services like Linkedin and Plaxo allow me to export my list of contacts maintained within their “walls” back into my contact list. In other words, they are — in effect — allowing me to brick-by-brick, tear down their walls: They are allowing me the opportunity to export my social network with me when I start using another service. That’s the type of win-win relationship all sites that are “social” in nature should offer their users…and, in the future, no doubt, some form of “persistent network identifier” will be an expected feature of all sites that want me to share with them who my contacts are.

I’m just an amateur networker, but I am one—just ask any of my friends. I look at my Address Book database on my Mac and go, “Just 658 entries? Is that all?” If I call a number twice at work—BOOM! it goes into the iPhone. [And it did that before with the Treo ... but now that I'm Jobsian, I can "BOOM!" Ahem.] One of these lazy Saturdays, I’ll sit down with my church’s pictorial directory and input every last scrap of data—and maybe even photos if I can get a scanner hooked up to my Mac. [Mental note: ask Misty for scanner advice.] But here’s where Rex really gets me:

I really like this “import” feature [Ed.: GMail contact list import into Twitter] as it provides a benefit to the user while adding to the growth potential of Twitter — we all benefit. However, there needs to be a corresponding “export” feature whereby I can export my Twitter contacts back in my direction.

Y’know, there used to be this beautiful app—a real one, mind you—that pulled data out of Facebook and dumped it into Address Book. I loved the idea, but because I was using a Treo at the time and was having Address Book horkups where the whole DB would wipe out, I never tried it … and then Facebook shut ‘em down. This one-way valve stuff? It sucks. You gotta let me in and out, man.

Data lock-in is just something that gets under my skin, whether it’s at work—oh, the stories I can’t tell you now but will after I retire or leave aerospace—or at home. I’m not quite Pilgrimarian about freedom, but I do nod my head at what he says.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I attended a magnet high school for science and mathematics. So did many of my friends: Jonathan, Rick, and Jess went to MSMS with me, Kat went to ASMS, and Brian went to NCSSM [which I didn't know until a few weeks ago]. I think that most of our friends very definitely could have gone to those schools if those opportunities had been available for them when they were ready for them. All of us lived away from home for two years in a magnet environment, but I bet that we’d all feel the same about this: specialization at that age is a bad, bad idea.

When I look at my curriculum, I made a bet going in that I would be an engineering major in college, so I was very, very heavy on physics and mathematics, taking every course offered by the school in both curricula. I discounted everything else that I could to focus as much as I could, forsaking AP courses in the humanities that I really wish that I’d taken because they would have interested and challenged me. [Some of my peers did take those courses, but they weren't able to take all the physics courses I did or able to do research at Mississippi State as I did.] At this point, you’re thinking, “What’s your point, Morris? You have an aerospace engineering degree and work in aerospace. You’re the prime candidate for this idea.”

Well, that ignores the fact that, for a period of time between 18 and 23, I felt like I’d been called into ordained ministry. [I now think that I was wrong, but man, the guilt messed me up for years.] I thought that all I’d done was very wrong for myself. I had a time of crisis, and I was ready to change. But because I had built up this massive momentum—insert your favorite fat joke here —I was never able to break out of it. Granted, I am totally happy with things now, but what if I’d gotten into my field and hated it? All that work would be for naught, and at 22, I would have been starting over in school. Sure, that wouldn’t have fazed me much, but what about the very kinds of at-risk kids that the program in Jersey is trying to reach? Those kids don’t have the resources to change horses mid-stream.

High school kids are not equipped to choose a career as they enter those hallowed halls.

So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called “major event – major cause” reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.

I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.

To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive, consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes — for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability.

[Emphasis mine.]

Typically, I scoff at conspiracy theories. [For example, I usually want to go all Buzz Aldrin on moon landing fakers. Crap, I shouldn't have said that, because now I'm going to draw wacko comments.] But in preparing this post, I had to consider something: I’m one of the people that has bought into the argument made about baseball’s performance-enhancing drugs problem that there had to be an active ignorance on the part of the caretakers of the game to allow all that stuff to happen. I’m now second-guessing this stance.

[HT: Schneier on Security]

Yep, from Bill Engvall to Maoist rebels in six leaps. Man, I love the Internet.

Here’s the relevant quotation from Kawasaki:

9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

I find it interesting that Kawasaki himself can’t be brief—I read through several dozen words to get to the meat of his argument. Thankfully, he didn’t bury the lede, because his final sentence gets at his essentials: who, what, why, and when. I find a couple of flaws with Kawasaki’s list here: not every business email will be sent to someone unfamiliar with your who and why. At this point in my career as a middle manager, I find that I know the who quite often, and the who tells me the why they need it. [For an example: when my vice-president emails me, I know who he is, and the why he needs it matters not to me---he's the boss, so he gets it.] Externally-focused notes do indeed have a need for his information, however.

A second flaw is the emphasis on brevity. Too often, I find that a lot of business correspondence is ill-considered—a request for some Government Furnished Equipment, for example, doesn’t come with any context of what it’s needed for. Folks go on fishing expeditions for things, and when people are fishing, others are going to eye those requests very warily. There’s often a lot of context missing in requests made—one reason, I think, that top-posting is so prevalent, as Charles Miller notes:

Top-posting over entire messages actually makes sense in this context. Having the entire previous conversation available “bottom-up” at the end of the message allows anyone to read the full history of the discussion, regardless of how badly their mail-client sucks, even if they have played no part in the prior conversation. Everyone who already knows what is being discussed can just stop reading after the signature of the most recent poster.

Lastly, I think that there’s a danger in being formulaic. As previously stated, context isn’t always required. In some cases, being formulaic will actually do battle with brevity, as trying to fit an argument or assertion within the bounds of the formula will distract from the point by overly belaboring it. As my European History teacher from high school, Donald “Sonny” Renfroe, was famous for saying, “Have it be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep it interesting.” In fact, I myself have fallen prey to this very peril in the writing of this entry, which could certainly have been done in one paragraph rather than five.

Guy Kawasaki argues that business emails should be as brief as possible: five sentences, explaining who you are, what you want, why you need it, and when you need it by. Kawasaki makes this assertion in a larger article about ten things to learn in school—a list that actually has twelve items—and does so by belaboring the point mightily and almost boring the reader before they get to the crux of the advice. Brevity is not always the best course of advice in business correspondence—sometimes, more context is needed. This often drives us a series of back-and-forth discussion points that lengthen the conversation and bounce from user-to-user, a process that’s driven most business email to use top-posting [a practice I find personally abhorrent but regularly use in business communication]. Finally, I argue that being formulaic can often drive the writer to add in unnecessary commentary merely in the guise of fitting the formula: five paragraphs, or 1000 words, or what have you. Having written this, I have successfully gotten to the formulaic point, and I will now remove my tongue from my cheek.

But here’s what makes Lam’s review slam-worthy: the conclusion:

One more thing. What took you guys so long to review this? And where are the fanboys I know and love/hate?
Like you, I’ve coveted the idea of an Apple phone since it wasn’t any more real than a unicorn. And when it was delivered last Friday, almost seven months after the announcement at Macworld 2007, the hype and spin were so thick, there was no way anyone could write an objective review. Ten days after I camped, plunked down $600 for one, and signed the two year contract, I think I have the perspective to understand what it means to live with this phone. Many reviews abound, but I don’t think anyone has written about it from the perspective of ownership yet. That’s my take on the situation. My mind is clear; this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

Ten days? Really? I know that we’re living on InternetTime these days, but ten days is an eyelash blink. That’s what makes the “I want to defend the skeptical nature of this review” thing so laughable. Ten days isn’t enough time for anyone to evaluate it.

Face it: most everyone who’s bought one to this point is a gadget geek. [Check.] Whether or not the device truly has any lasting impact isn’t going to be known for some time yet—probably not even in 2007. Sure, you’re going to see brisk early sales for a device that’s this hyped—just like Hollywood blockbusters have an initial boomlet. But for an early adopter to argue that ten days gives him enough perspective … sorry, I don’t buy it.

[My initial feelings on the iPhone---with just three full days of ownership---are twofold: one, I really like using it, and two, I really like watching other people use it. But I really only care about the first in the long run; the second just strokes my considerable ego.]

• Quincunical maps are “a conformal map projection [s] (except for 4 points where its conformality fails) that presents the sphere as a square.” Pretty interesting stuff, if you’re interested in map projections, as I am. [Picked up from the article on quincunxes, which I linked into from Angkor Wat after a mention of the temple on ABC World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson.
• I've spent a fair amount of time reading Antarctica-related articles lately. It really made me wonder if Emilio Marcos Palma had ever written a book about being the only child of Antarctica, but it seems that he hasn't [on Amazon.com, anyway]. I was also quite fascinated by the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition—enough to want to read a book on it, perhaps—and Lake Vostok. Any lake that’s still liquid at -3°C because of massive pressure from glacial ice above and geothermal heating below is wicked cool, regardless of what implications that has for life on Europa. “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.” Come on … never tell engineers, “Don’t do this.” We’re gonna poke it with a stick, man.
• My senior-year high school roommate Jason sent me a friend request on Facebook today, and after accepting it, I found that he was at SUNY-Stony Brook. Hell, I didn’t know where Stony Brook was until I looked it up. I look at those median family incomes and go, “Man. Too rich for my blood.”

May you get sucked in for a good hour or two as I have.

• Falls Church, Virginia is the smallest city in the United States, in terms of surface area. Yes, 10,377 people lived in 2.0 square miles at the time of the 2000 Census. I mean, that’s not Manhattan-level population density, but it does make one think. You could reasonably walk the perimeter of the city in a hour or so, and … yeah.
• There are 3,077 counties in the United States, an average of 62 a state. There’s only one state with 62 counties—New York. Since when is New York average in anything?
• Jeff Tweedy sings, “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” What are the poorest places in the United States? As someone who has lived in the twin states of Mississippi and Alabama for the last 16 years, I figured that plenty of places in those two states would be high on the list. I was wrong; South Dakota has four of the five-poorest counties in America. All four of those counties have, as you might expect, Indian reservations. Starr County, Texas, on the Mexican border, is the poorest U.S. county without a reservation in it. Mississippi’s first listing is #17, and Alabama’s is #27.

Unlike most of my Wikipedia excursions, I can actually remember how this one got started: I asked myself what the major metropolitan areas were in the Mountain Time Zone. Seeing that two Texas counties were in the Mountain Time Zone, I then got interested about counties, and … well, there it went.

What’ve you been looking at on Wikipedia lately?

Also, the more I find out about John Ashcroft now that he’s out of office, the better he looks. I still think that he went too far, but compared with some of the people in this Administration who’ve done their best to throw away American civil liberties and large parts of the Constitution, he doesn’t seem so bad.

Makes me a little sick that I voted for these clowns. Twice.

An aside, which has very little to do with Koppel’s auditorial …

I have been thinking, though, that mass media and one-to-many media—essentially, the media revolution of the last 30 years—is going to be the force that makes large-scale armed conflict largely irrelevant. Civilized societies largely seem to have no stomach for war when fully faced with the atrocities of same. Regardless of whether or not you buy into just war doctrine in particular [I vacillate] or as it applies to Iraq [I vacillate even more ], you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who prefers war to the alternatives. Such folks are, generally, uncivilized, and I think the greater access to information is, in itself, a civilizing force.

And if none of this makes sense, well:

1. I’m really out of the practice of writing these days.
2. I’m dashing through this while on a lunch break right before a teleconference that starts in eight minutes.
3. I didn’t write this as a five-paragraph essay.

[And yes, Stephen, that was totally a way to draw you out for a smart remark. You may make it and then return to your pre-baby fretting.]

Okay, back to listening to roughs and demos from the new Caedmon’s album.

Wicked awesome.