I formed a Bike to Work team at Cozi. More at the Cozi Connections Blog

Last week was the second anniversary of my brother Mark's wedding to Lizzy.

Next week will be the first anniversary of my sister Michelle's wedding to David.

The day after that, my parents will be flying to Egypt to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their first date.

And Emma and I just got back from a three-day weekend in Astoria, Oregon, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our own first date.

Sheesh!

My little brother, Mark Reilly aka the Alien Resident, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Tuesday and may now be addressed as "Dr. Reilly."

He studied part-time at the European Graduate School in New York City, while juggling several jobs. His doctorate is in Media and Communications and the topic was Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution, which he picked before 9/11.

He is only the second PhD in the family. My uncle Pat Deasy was the first.

Congratulations, Mark!

Cozi is hiring. We have positions for Developers and Web Developers.

We're a small Web 2.0 startup, based in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle. Our Cozi Central product is groupware for families: it helps parents manage their own and their kids' schedules, shopping lists, and reminders, from computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.

If you're interested, let me know.

Update: we have some non-developer positions too.

This year is the 21st anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The Reagan administration was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. LLAA cooks more than 100,000 fresh meals each year, provides case management for 946 people, assists 800 people with housing resources, packs 30,000 grocery bags, and distributes condoms and safe-sex information to high-risk populations.

I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS. Please help me raise money again for this year's walk on Saturday, September 29th. I aim to raise at least $1000.

You can sponsor me by going to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you'll be helping thank you.

Note: Emma and I are having a fundraising barbecue on Sunday 23rd September. Email me for more details.

I worked at Atlas Solutions, a subsidiary of aQuantive, from October 2005 to July 2007.

Google bought our largest competitor, DoubleClick, for $3 Billion in April 2006. In the following five weeks, all the other major web advertising companies were bought up, culminating in Microsoft paying the stupendous sum of $6 billion for aQuantive. The Microsoft-aQuantive deal closes in mid-August.

To put it mildly, I was not excited at the thought of becoming a Microsoft employee yet again. Cumulatively, between 1992 and 2005, I spent 10 years at Microsoft as an employee or contractor, including a year and a half on Cairo, seven years on IIS, and a year on FlexGo.

Nevertheless, I had absolutely no desire to go back to being a Microserf. I don't like Microsoft's business practices, I'm sick of the evil empire vibe, I'm tired of the hostility to Open Source, I don't want to work for asshats like Steve Ballmer, and I have old scars from my earlier tours of duty that trigger my fight-or-flight response. I've done my time in the Redmond saltmines and I just want to be a productive member of society now. Microsoft is like a gravitational black hole: it warps everything in its vicinity. Life is too short to work at a company whose values are fundamentally different to my own.

Your mileage may vary. I know many decent people at Microsoft who are doing good work. I applaud them, but I do not wish to rejoin them.

That's not to say that I think everyone should flee Atlas. Having Microsoft on your resume is a definite plus, and it's the right choice for many people. I think everyone should make their own cost-benefit analysis and decide if they want to work for Microsoft or not. I've written code that literally runs on hundreds of millions of machines: http.sys, available on all Windows XP SP2 machines, Windows Server 2003, and Vista. There are few other companies where you can have that kind of reach.

However, Microsoft and Atlas have very different corporate cultures. Microsoft is a hard-assed, hard-driving culture. Atlas has a far more reasonable pro-work-life-balance culture. I've seen several alpha-male types being rejected by the team-fit interviews at Atlas who would have fit in just fine at Microsoft.

Microsoft claim that they will make few changes to aQuantive and Atlas. Certainly, they would be incredibly foolish to kill the golden goose after spending such an enormous amount. I really hope they have the sense to leave well enough alone.

Anyway, I'm not going to find out first hand. I spent a few weeks looking around in June, and I found a new position at Cozi.com. My last day at Atlas was Friday, July 27th. I'll miss my old team in Emerging Media. They were the best team that I ever worked on, and I'm proud of the Video-on-Demand and In-Stream web video products that we built.

My criteria for a new job were that it should be a small company, somewhere in downtown Seattle or Fremont, within an easy bus ride of my home in Beacon Hill, doing something reasonably interesting. From 1992 to 2005, all my jobs were on the Eastside, while I lived in Seattle proper. I never, ever want to commute across Lake Washington again. Atlas has 300 or 400 employees, aQuantive has 2600, and Microsoft has 78,000. I wanted a small company, where it's really possible to make a difference.

On Monday, August 6th, I'll be starting work at Cozi.com, building groupware products for families: shared calendars, lists, messages, photos, Outlook integration, and so on. Cozi is in the Smith Tower, three blocks from Atlas's Pioneer Square location. Cozi is a two-year-old startup with 18 people when I signed on, and they flattered me by aggressively pursuing me. I have high hopes that it's going to work out.

Cozi recently raised $4 million in a second round of angel financing. We consider our biggest competitor to be pencil and paper and we like to consider ourselves as a digital refrigerator magnet. The Wall Street Journal's Mossberg Solution and Lifehacker have favorable reviews of the released product. PodVentureZone has a multipart interview (mostly transcribed) with Robbie Cape, Cozi's CEO and co-founder.

Cozi's vacation policy is 2+2. Everyone gets two weeks off when they choose, and the company closes for a week at Christmas and a week in August (this week). I've spent the last week doing a lot of cycling around the Seattle area. We're going to Ireland and Italy at the end of August, and Emma couldn't take any more time off.

Back to work next week. Wish me luck.

I made my radio debut this afternoon. The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read a couple of short excerpts on KBCS from James Joyce's Ulysses, as a foretaste of the readings we're doing next weekend.

This year's reading is of the Nausicaa chapter, wherein Leopold Bloom reposes on a beach to recover from clashing with the Citizen in the previous chapter, and flirts at a distance with young Gerty MacDowell. This is the infamous masturbation chapter that led to Ulysses being banned for obscenity.

There are two readings.

• Sat, June 16th, 4:30pm
  Elliott Bay Bookstore
  101 S. Main St,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

• Sun, June 17th, 6pm
  Pike Pub and Brewery
  1415 First Ave,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

I will be one of several readers giving voice to Leopold Bloom. It is likely that Jim McDermott will once again be reading with us.

I got myself a R.E.Load bag for my birthday. My previous bag, a so-called Large Cafe bag from Tom Bihn, wasn't large enough to accommodate a 17" MacBook Pro.

The R.E.Load bag turned out to be last than ideal. It is, if anything, too big, and it lacks dividers and smaller pockets. My laptop and other stuff was swimming around inside it. It's a messenger bag aimed at real bike messengers, not laptop-toting nerds.

Last weekend, I went down to Tom Bihn's showroom again and picked up a Super Ego bag, like the one pictured here. This bag is designed to tote laptops, and it's working out a lot better.

I still have the other bag for now. R.E.Load would only take it back for in-store credit, and I didn't see myself wanting another bag from them. I haven't decided if I'm going to hang on to it, or try to sell it on Craig's List.

It's a pity. I like the outside of the R.E.Load bag and the inside of the Tom Bihn bag.

Ignite Seattle is a series of geek nights in Seattle, hosted by O'Reilly Radar and Make magazine. The third one is coming up on Thursday, April 5th, at CHAC, the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

Could be interesting. I think I might go.

Paging through the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, I spotted the obituary for Tsai-Fan Yu, the physician who developed effective treatments for gout, including allopurinol and colchicine.

I take allopurinol every day, topping up with colchicine when I feel gouty, so I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

I blogged before about my gout. (Indeed, this is why I put up the mega repost yesterday of my old EraBlog posts, to make my gout post available before writing this one.)

Nothing has changed, for better or for worse, regarding my gout. I take allopurinol every day and expect to do so for the rest of my life, unless a cure for gout is found. Fortunately for me, it's quite manageable. In the old days, gout could be both crippling and agonizing. I have had some severe attacks, early in this decade, before my case was definitively diagnosed. One of my knees would swell up and become intensely painful. Even bending it slightly so that I could get into a car and be driven to a doctor to get painkillers would cause me to break out into a cold sweat. I'm damn glad I don't have to live with that kind of pain on a daily basis.

I came across Gout News while researching this post, an ongoing compendium of gout-related news stories..

In Blast from the Past I, I presented about half of the posts that I made on my original blog at EraBlog.

I'm reposting the remaining posts now.

2003/03/18: Red, White, and Green

2003/03/21: Rallying at the Seattle Federal Building

2003/03/21: The Unseen Gulf War

2003/03/24: When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

2003/03/30: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

2003/04/22: Her Left Foot

2003/04/24: Sleep Apnea

2003/05/16: Naturalization

2003/06/11: Bloomsday

2003/06/12: Howard Dean for President

2003/07/07: Bloomsday Speech

2003/07/10: Ping-Pong Reloaded

2003/07/23: Iraqi Dead Parrot

2003/07/25: U.S. Citizen

2003/07/27: What Makes a Conservative?

2003/08/14: Spinning our Hearts and Minds

2003/10/07: Spolin Games

2003/10/11: Gout

2003/10/18: Bob Beckel

2003/12/02: Free Ruslan Sharipov

2004/02/11: Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

2004/02/11: Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

2004/06/25: Moved to weblogs.asp.net

2005/12/05: Moved to GeorgeVReilly.com/blog

There are a few old posts at weblogs.asp.net that I should repost here for completeness.

The Ides of March rolls around again, and it's my birthday. I am now the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Emma gave me the messenger bag shown here. I picked it up from R.E.Load Baggage. The 17" MacBook Pro is too large for my previous shoulder bag.

The video clip below shows the Bugatti Veyron, the world's fastest and most expensive street-legal car attempting to hit its top speed of 253 mph. I guess I'm not getting one of these for my birthday.

I noted at the beginning of July that my sister Michelle was to be married to David Bowles in Dublin in early November.

The wedding took place on Friday, November 10th. Emma and I arrived the afternoon before, half stumbling with tiredness. My brother, Mark, and his wife, Lizzy, had arrived from New York only hours earlier.

The ceremony took place at 1pm at St. Brigid's, a small, old Anglican church, on the outskirts of Stillorgan village, long since absorbed into the Dublin metropolitan area. It was very Ascendancy, with 19th century plaques about Fellow of the Royal College this and Brevet Colonel (Boer War) that.

The bride looked lovely, and I have the photos to prove it.

After the wedding, we all repaired to Barberstown Castle for the reception. There were, I think, 160 guests who partied late into the night. Emma and I gave up around 1:30, exhausted from the jet lag. My mother didn't get to bed until after 4am. Philip Bowles, David's father, who had been undergoing chemotherapy, was in fine form and stayed up nearly as late.

Emma and I had arranged to stay a second night at Barberstown Castle, and I ended up sleeping until 4pm on the Saturday, trying to sleep off the drink and the jetlag.

The following week, my mother and I went through the nearly 400 photos that she, Emma, David Reilly, and I had taken, and whittled it down to 74 representative ones. She badly wanted to send the photos to her friends around the world, so I set up a Picasa web album for her and uploaded them.

Mark set up a site for Michelle and David before the wedding, but it doesn't yet link to the photos.

Email is addictive because of "operant conditioning":

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. ... The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.

... Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless.

So what to do about it?

If a behaviour isn't rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don't want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this - imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be.

I didn't find any suggestions that were particularly effective, however.

I'm not addicted to email, per se. I can however surf the web endlessly. There's always one more fascinating link to follow.

In my wanderings, I recently came across two sites where you can ask all kinds of strange questions, with a reasonable expectation of getting an answer.

Little Details: "writers have questions, other writers have answers". A LiveJournal community for writers seeking all kinds of background information for their plots. Some samples:

• 1920's cold remedies

• Danish drinking songs

• Control parents have over their children testifying.

Ask MetaFilter is more general purpose. It's a good place to go when your question can't be reduced to a keyword search on Google. Sample questions:

• What's the fastest and cheapest way to paint a red room white?

• Is there a program for the Mac that will scroll a window to capture a screenshot of its entire contents?

• I want to be my own YouTube/Google video. Is there an easy way to show videos on my own server embedded in a page?

• What's the best vegan substitute for lard?

I experimented with Google's new service, Google Transit.

It suggested this route for traveling from my home to my work:

 Begin by walking
 1   Start at 4XXX 13th Ave S
 2   Go to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way (takes about 7 mins)

 Take the King County Metro 131 (Direction: NORTH)
 3   7:17pm leave from Airport Way S & S Industrial Way
 4   7:24pm arrive at 4th Ave S & S Jackson St

 End by walking
 5   Go to 315 5th Ave S (takes about 2 mins)

This fails badly in two respects.

First, four bus routes run along 15th Avenue S, two blocks east of my house: the 39, the 32, the 36, and the 60. The 39 drops me one block from work at 4th & Jackson. The 60 leaves me at 12th & Jackson. The 36 only runs along 15th after 7pm; earlier than that, I a 10-minute walk to Beacon Ave. And the 32 is an express bus that only runs at rush hour.

Second, it suggests that it's a seven-minute walk to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way. Actually, it's a two-mile walk, because I-5 and the railroad are in the way. You have the unpleasant choices of walking north to Spokane Street and climbing down an endless set of stairs at the freeway onramp, or south to the Lucile St bridge. And even if there were a direct route, it would take at least 10 minutes to walk down there.

That said, it integrates very nicely with Google Maps.

The Google Transit page links to Metro Trip Planner, which does a better job. Their disambiguation of addresses sucks, however. Try entering 5th & Jackson. It suggests a short list, starting with 5TH AVE S & S JACKSON ST (in SEATTLE). However, if you actually type that address into the main page, it offers you a long list of suggestions. In other words, it can't consume its own output.

Update 2006/12/29. I just tried the same experiment again. Google Transit now correctly suggests walking two blocks east to 15th Ave S and taking the 39.

As I mentioned last month, I participated in this year's AIDS Walk on Saturday.

I raised over $1300 online, handily exceeding my goal of $1,000. I also raised another $300 in cash and checks at the fundraising barbecue that we threw on September 1st.

I've lost count, but I believe that in the last 15 years, I've raised about $10,000 for charity. Most of it has been for the Northwest AIDS Walk. The last few years that I was at Microsoft, I raised $2,000-$3,000 each year, thanks to the power of Microsoft matching, which doubled the amount of money that I raised. I've also raised money two years running for Ugandan orphans sponsored by Vim: Microsoft Vim Users raised $2650 for orphans in Uganda.

Go me!

MoneyCentral is reporting that our Video On Demand product is running a major pilot:

Cable television operator Sunflower Broadband and MTV Networks today announced that they are launching a market-leading campaign to dynamically insert national advertisements into on-demand cable television. Sunflower will begin dynamically placing ads into MTV Networks on-demand programming this week. The first campaign, created and managed by the agency Mediaedge:cia, promotes the theatrical release of Paramount Pictures' and MTV Films' major motion picture "jackass number two", in theaters nationwide on September 22. Ads for the movie will be inserted into Comedy Central On Demand programs at the moment that viewers request the free on-demand shows.

more ...

In mid-July, most of the Atlas Solutions developer teams moved from our old offices at Fifth and Jackson in the International District four blocks west to swanky offices in Pioneer Square. The new offices are at the State building on the corner of Occidental and Main, the pedestrianized block with the antique stores and art galleries. Occidental Park across the street has been refurbished. There are three coffee shops within two blocks, and Elliott Bay Books is one block west of us. It's all very pleasant, with the exception of the large number of homeless people.

The only thing that I miss from the old offices is that we're further from the large number of Asian restaurants in the International District.

I move back to 5&J the week after next. Two developers from my team, Atlas OnDemand, are being loaned to another team for a few months.

The picture of me on a milk carton arises from the email exchange after the loan was announced. Our boss said that he would post pictures of the two of us so that the OnDemand team wouldn't forget what we look like. I demanded to see my picture on a milk carton and, lo, that was arranged forthwith.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was considered a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The U.S. government was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized by health authorities, and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year in the U.S., and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-fifth of the adults in southern Africa have HIV! Nearly 40 milllion people are living with HIV around the world, and another 25 million are dead.

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS services and awareness.

Please help me meet my fundraising goal of $1000 this year by sponsoring me at my AIDS Walk page. I will be walking on September 9th.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you help thank you.

Update: Go to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk to sponsor me.

My brother David sent me this photo earlier today, of me, him, and Michelle. I'm guessing that Michelle is less than a year old, so it was taken sometime in 1971, which would make David four and me six. (Our youngest brother, Mark, wasn't born until 1973.)

Emma thinks we're adorable and has already made this picture her desktop background on her work computer.

Mark has another photo of the four of us, taken in 1978 on his website, alienresident.net:

Raven is now Doctor Raven. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in biomedical informations this morning. Six long years in the making.

Dr. Raven and Mr. Raven came over this evening for Games Night, a twice-monthly get-together we have for our friends to play board games. Emma and I had been given a bottle of Dom Perignon '92 for our wedding that we had never quite found a suitable occasion for until now, so we chilled that in anticipation of tonight's celebration. I generally don't care for champagne, but that went down nicely.

Congratulations, Raven!

I hadn't really planned to visit Ireland this year, but then my sister Michelle phoned the other day to say that her boyfriend, David Bowles, had just proposed to her. Not a big surprise. They had moved in together earlier this year, and we were all assuming that it was a question of when, not if.

They plan to get married quite soon, as his father has been given six-to-nine months to live, and they want him to be at the wedding. I don't know if the date is firm yet, but the latest that I'm hearing is November 11th.

I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times about some useful lessons learned from animal trainers.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

... 

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

... 

On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

... 

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

Hmmm...

In May, I pounded out a record 31 blog posts. June draws to a close and this is only my third post.

In brief, here's some of the highlights of June.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses on June 16th. I read a part and I was also the script wrangler and webmaster.

My profile on my Windows XP laptop got corrupted. I decided that I would make flatten it and turn it into a dual-boot system. I'm now on my third week of running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). Quite easy to get going. Not so easy to get everything that I wanted running on it.

In late May at WinHEC, Microsoft announced FlexGo, the new pay-as-you-go and subscription versions of Windows. I spent a year working on this project, specifically on the hardware locking that underlies the business model. I swear I will write a more interesting post on this soon.

This weekend was Gay Pride, which was held for the first time at the Seattle Center. I helped staff the Freely Speaking Toastmasters booth yesterday morning.

As one of my commitments when I stepped down as president of BiNet Seattle I made up a new banner, which we marched behind in the Raise Your Voice march yesterday evening.

My woodworking class has finished, so my Tuesday nights are free for the summer. I'm making a coffee table. It's about half finished. I've taken a few photos along the way; I'll have to post some of them.

My opera education continues. Tonight, we saw Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's MacBeth.

I used to be very familiar with Shakespeare's MacBeth, having studied it for two years in preparation for the Leaving Certificate (the major examination at the end of Irish secondary school; effectively the entrance exam for university).

Verdi's opera of MacBeth truncates Shakespeare's plot, concentrating on the tragic flaw of the MacBeths. Their shared ambition, feeding off each other, both impels them to power, and leads to their ultimate downfall. The opera was written during the Risorgimento, when Italy was trying to break away from the Austrian empire, and doubles as a thinly veiled appeal to Italian patriotism.

I had more fun at Cosi Fan Tutte, when we saw it in March. The music and singing was fine in MacBeth, but I did not care for the monochromatic costumes and sets, which reminded me of Mourning Becomes Electra. The cast looked as if they had stepped out of a daguerrotype of a funeral. There's no fun in Verdi's MacBeth. Shakespeare's tragedies are always leavened by some comic doings, but not Verdi's.

I first started blogging at EraBlog in February 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq war. EraBlog never really took off and now seems to be experiencing technical problems.

I'm reposting all of my original posts. I've cleaned up the links, where possible, and added an image at the top of each one, but have not otherwise modified the posts.

As you can see, Iraq weighed on my mind. And I was fucking right! Going to war was wrong, and even then I (like many others) could see that the case for war was lacking.

2003/02/07: Casus Belli

2003/02/07: Pencil Carvings

2003/02/07: State of the Union

2003/02/07: Hasbians: Bi for Now

2003/02/07: Barbara Lee: Public Enemy Number One?

2003/02/08: Bush-Iraq parody of Nigerian spam scam

2003/02/09: Casus Belli II

2003/02/09: TiVo

2003/02/09: Powell at the UN

2003/02/14: Patriot Act II

2003/02/14: Hans Blix reports to the UN

2003/02/14: Seattle Peace Rally, Sat 15th Feb, Seattle Center

2003/02/20: The Seattle March

2003/02/21: MSNBC's The Savage Nation

2003/02/24: Why Nerds are Unpopular in American high schools

2003/02/26: Why God is a Computer Programmer

2003/03/04: Irish Personals

2003/03/12: The Onion does St. Patty's Day

2003/03/17: Candlelight Vigil for Peace

2003/03/18: How Bush made enemies of our allies

More to follow tomorrow.

Today (May 6th) was our sixth wedding anniversary. In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. In others, it feels like we've been together forever.

Six pretty good years. Lots of good memories. Quiet times. Happy times. Travel together. Staying home together. Going out together. Mixing with our friends.

Not perfect years. I'd change a few things if I could, like Emma's health and her two long periods of unemployment. I should have quit Microsoft months before I did in 2004.

We celebrated by having some friends over for dinner. Raven came with Mr. Raven. Muhsin and Banu, newly back from a long trip to Turkey, came too. I made Afghan Chicken. It was a little dry this time, but it was still a big hit. Emma hurt her foot last week, so I did all the cooking.

Tomorrow morning, we're going on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train for brunch.

The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

... 

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

... 

Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ad