arik.org

Yes, I know I practically never write anything here these days, but it’s not as I haven’t been busy. I’ve been, among other things, rebuilding my Web clips file, and so far I’ve got three quarters of 2007 done, after which I’ll go back and do similar pages for 2006, 2005, and then the FDC years (2000 to mid-2005) all following the same format. After that I’ll go through the years at EN, IW, NCN, and if time and resources allow, digitize the stuff from before that. (No small feat, that.)

But so far this year, and not counting anything from the first quarter, I’ve written 63 stories, 14 Byte columns, five magazine stories and recorded 40 videos (not counting the one I shot today). Look for yourself:

Second Quarter

Third Quarter

Fourth Quarter to date

Of course none of this reflects what I really spend most of my day doing: Deflecting PR pitches from industry neophytes who haven’t done their research into what I cover, but figure since I cover “technology” that I’ll naturally be interested in their client. They’re the ones who clearly haven’t read any of my recent stories because for some reason they don’t think its necessary because my name is on some list their boss has given them and as such they’re expected to call me, but not smart enough to speak up and say “Hey boss, I don’t think this is Arik’s cup of tea.” Yes, they’re the same ones who are audibly irritated when I tell them I’ve never 1) heard of their client, and 2) have no use a meeting as there’s zero chance I’ll ever write about them and 3) try to find some “angle” that they think will keep me interested, all the while running up the bill they’ll submit to their clients. And yes, I’ll admit: I can sometimes be quite harsh in my rejections, and think nothing of hanging up on an unprepared PR flunkie mid-pitch. It isn’t pleasant, but I have a lot to do, and limited time.

In any event, the above scenario should be less frequent as I finish the build-out of the archives. Even the laziest of PR professionals can Google my name, click on the first link (or third; it varies) and navigate to the “clips” section, and find an itemized list showing what I’ve written recently, and for that matter, in the distant past. Or at least that’s the idea. So ever so slowly, I’ll get these pages built, if only to give the flacks a crutch, and maybe spare myself some unnecessary phone calls.

Over the weekend, I tried to put up a live stream of some John Lee Hooker tunes I have stashed in my iTunes playlist (8 hours worth!) using a program called Nicecast. It didn’t work, despite my best efforts to figure it out. So here’s the next best thing, a couple of live tunes from my bootleg holdings. So here at least is a sample of what I had in mind. The first track, Serves Me Right To Suffer is taken from a 1976 session in Chicago. The other is a 13-minute rendition of Boogie Chillin’ from a performance in Montigny Les Metz, France in either 1981 or 1983. So, at least now you have an idea of what I had in mind. And yes, it still seems like a good day to play the blues.

I got your blues right here. How’s about a heaping helping of Hooker?

Just for the weekend, I’ve created “Serves You Right To Suffer Radio.”

Tune in here. It should work in iTunes.

Update: No it didn’t work. See above.

Got back from the annual trip south this week, and spent a good deal of the time reading, and when not doing that, acquiring more stuff to read. We stayed first at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. More on the trip and maybe some pictures later.

But there sitting by the Relaxation Pool (where the lifeguards actually enforce a rule requiring patrons to speak quietly and to forgo wireless phones) I worked my way through the second half of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It’s an utterly fascinating if dense read. Essentially what Tuchman does is tell the story of Europe during a period where the entire continent was, putting it lightly, down on its luck. Starting with a climate change now known as The Little Ice Age which had begun in or about the year 1250, the weather began to cool and agriculture became problematic. This followed a period of unusually warm weather which had been favorable to farming and so had encouraged a period of population growth. With less food to go around, life became harder for average people, who were generally shackled by the rules of the feudal system. Against that backdrop came The Black Death which killed some 20 million people in Europe, and some 75 million worldwide. The population of England is thought to have dropped from 7 million to 2 million by 1400.

And if the plague didn’t kill you, war might. England and France began what we now call The Hundred Years’ War which actually lasted 116 years. Meanwhile other wars minor wars were fought in Italy, in the territory now known as Switzerland, and in Spain.

And if war didn’t get you, then marauding gangs of out-of-work mercenaries might. These “free companies” were generally made up of men who had been employed in the private armies assembled to fight in the various campaigns. But when the fighting would pause, they instead sack whatever village or town happened to be nearby.

And if that weren’t enough, there were various political upheavals, a papal schism (two competing claimants to the throne of St. Peter, one in Rome, one in Avignon), and more than few popular revolts, such as the Jacquerie in France.

Tuchman tells the story largely through the eyes of one person, Enguerrand de Coucy who was an important French nobleman, and sire of a domain in northern France called Coucy now in the department of Aisne in the regions of Picardie. (See some fabulous pictures of the original castle at Coucy, or rather what’s left of it, here.) His mother was a Habsburg — a fact which later caused him to lead an ill-advised war to claim some Austrian land he thought should be his — and his first wife was English. In fact she was the daughter of the King of England, Isabella, and he met her while serving five years as a voluntary hostage in English custody on the orders of the King of France. (Long story.) Through this marriage he became in addition to a titled French Sire, also an English Earl, and as such was in the unique position of owing allegiance to both kings. Given that the two countries were engaged in an epic war, it was, shall we day, a little awkward.

With all this trouble brewing, no one in Europe gave much thought to the problem of the Turkish invasions. What we now call The Ottoman Empire was on its initial rise at this point, and its eyes were set on Eastern Europe. Western Europe didn’t give much thought to it, though every King went to great lengths to talk about how important the idea of “crusade against the infidel” — that is against Islam — was to them, they rarely did much about it. Enguerrand was twice involved in rare occasions when one king or another decided launch a crusade, first in Tunisia, and then later in Hungary, where he was ultimately taken prisoner at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396.

The story of any century is always a complicated one and sorting out the many moving parts into a coherent narrative is no small feat. Tuchman spent seven chapters building a foundation and setting the stage so that the life of Enguerrand and his place in the many events that shaped his time can be placed within the massively complex context. The modern reader can’t help but find it challenging to keep track of the many crowned heads and ever-changing alliances and loyalties, deals, betrayals, claims and counter-claims as well as all the realms, territories and fiefdoms. The idea of nationalism — a shared cultural identity — was a new one that hadn’t yet taken hold in France and Italy, but England was already English. As such there is no such thing as a national army in this time period, and for every royal act that on its face seems to make sense and which is enacted for the “good of the people,” there are 10 or 20 such acts that are carried out for the good of the king taking the action and his many nobles seeking his favor and offering money, material and other such things necessary to carry out the war of the moment. A present-day reader’s head can’t help but ache at the neglect of the common people and the sheer idiocy of fighting endless wars amid such economic and social instability.

Tuchman tells a compelling, if disturbing and downright depressing tale of a miserable time and the people who couldn’t — or wouldn’t — do anything to make it any better.

Here’s the view from the hotel room at the Desert Springs Resort in Palm Desert, Calif. The weather, temperatures in the 70s, certainly compares favorably with that of New York today though it should be noted that New York’s winter, thus far has been relatively balmy and notable for it shirt-sleeved temperatures well into January.

Arrived in Palm Desert Sunday after a weekend in Los Angeles, my first trip to that other cultural capital of the world, and I have to say I like LA, especially Beverly Hills. Having had two breakfasts there, I can honestly say I think that Nate’n Al is the very best diner/coffee shop/deli in all America and nothing less than a national treasure. Never mind Spago, or Trader Vic’s, if you haven’t eaten at Nate’n Al, you haven’t eaten in Beverly Hills. End of story.

Also visited Mann’s Chinese Theater (originally Grauman’s) in Hollywood, and snapped this detail of Leonard Nimoy’s hand print with my phone.

Web access logs are a funny thing, when you own your own domain. You get to look at a lot of interesting information, such as the domain names from which people visit your site, but also a little about how they get there.

I look at them from time to time, and occasionally find some odd things vaguely related to things I’ve written about and the articles I host here. There are lots of hits from people searching for information about Bungee Jumping. No surprise there. Or there’s people looking for information about computer hackers. Again, no surprise there.

But three were very curious. They were Google search requests with the syntax “www.arik+air” and then another “arik+jobs+publish” and finally, “on+the+wings+of+arik”.

Having explored the peculiar history of my first name, I figured I’d see where these searches led and plugged them into Google myself. It turns out there’s a new twist: Arik Air is an airline.

Somewhere over the skies of the African nation of Nigeria, there are airplanes bearing the name Arik. According to its corporate history, it emerged in part from the liquidation of that nation’s national airline. A local businessman, stepped up and purchased one of its aircraft for his personal use, and soon word spread and private citizens in the gas and oil industry were using his plane to fly around the country. It wasn’t long before he bought another, and then a few more. I don’t know where the idea for its name came from.

I get irritable at the end of the summer. It wasn’t always that way. I liked the fall, liked the transition to the new season, a shot at a fresh start whether academically or at work. September always seemed like a clean slate. Now I dislike it, in no small part because of the insisten cultural pounding that always starts toward the end of August around Sept. 11. The image pictured is pretty much what I saw that day, and it seared itself into my brain as I stepped out of the subway tunnel at the 22nd St. and Park Ave. and walked west toward the Flatiron building.

This is the time of the year where people ask me “where were you when it happened?” I was underground, okay? I didn’t actually see the planes hit, but I saw the buildings fall. I stopped to vote. The primary election for mayor was on that day, and I stopped as I left home, first thinking I wouldn’t bother, as everyone knew that Bloomberg was going to win in the general election. Then I remembered how much I really disliked Mark Greene and figured I’d go to the trouble of voting for Alan Hevesi, not that Hevesi stood the slightest chance of winning or anything, but it seemed important at the time. If I hadn’t stopped to do that, I’d have seen the whole thing, not that I would have wanted to.

I remember the subway ride was uncharacteristically slow, but nothing else about it. I wasn’t terribly eager to get to the office, and it was an incredibly beautiful day, the kind of day that makes you depressed that you have to be cooped up inside doing things that seem important but really aren’t.

So I got out of the subway and walked west, crossed Broadway and noticed something I can only really describe as a buzz around me. I didn’t hear anything that told me something was wrong, but it was just a sense of something out of place, of people agitated for some reason, but I couldn’t place it and from where I was, couldn’t see anything amiss. The first clue was people looking at their wireless phones, that look that says “I’m trying to make a call but can’t get through, let me look and see how my signal is.” Two or three guys were doing this, and as I pressed on in the along the south side the Flatiron building a woman, walking east who seemed to know the guys walking near me, said “This is just insane.”

At this point my pager went off. I reached down to grab it and looked south, at 22nd Street and Broadway. I don’t remember which came first: Did I read the pager, or did I see the holes in the towers? The message was a news alert from CNN that arrived at 9:12 AM. It read: “World trade center damaged; unconfirmed reports say a plane has crashed into tower. Details to come.” I could clearly see that there were two holes, one in each tower, and couldn’t figure out why that would be caused by one plane. Of course by this point the second plane had already crashed into the towers ten minutes prior. CNN got around to “alerting” me to the second plane by 9:22, by which time I was already in my office.

From that location I was one of several who watched the towers come down from Jim Spanfeller’s office. Someone hadn’t paid the office satellite TV bill, so I and my colleagues couldn’t watch TV news like the rest of the world. We didn’t really need it.

That’s the gist of my Sept. 11 story. I’m not terribly interested in observing the 5th anniversary of what was for me a really unpleasant day with the rest of you. Images of that day on TV make me shaky. Seeing the trailer for that Oliver Stone movie made me mad, but I was glad to see no line outside the Zeigfeld theater where that cinematic calamity happens to be playing as I walked home tonight.

I want to get over it. Its the rest of the country that insists on dredging up old video tape and pictures and survivors tales and permeating the media with it all. I don’t want to weep and shed tears while watching stupid movies made by and for stupid people about it. I’d like to forget it, and frankly I wish those of you who insist on partaking in this cultural weepfest, buying special anniversary editions of magazines and watching TV documentary specials about it all would find something else to entertain yourselves. I have a better idea: Go rent “The Cruise” instead. I found a clip from that neglected 1998 documentary on Youtube, and it appears below.

This is a test posting. What I’m testing is whether or not Writely, the Web-based word processor, is a suitable method for writing and posting blog entries. Typos and proofreading are a real hassle in the traditional Blogger interface, and often I write first in Microsoft Word, then cut and paste to Blogger. But since writely lets you publish directly to Blogger (both are owned by Google after all), I figure why not try and save myself a step. So here goes.

The phone rang late in the morning as it often does. I expected the usual — some PR person looking for a little attention for a client. It was a PR person, but was actually one who worked for my own outfit fielding a request from an outside outfit needing some comment on the latest corporate happenings at a certain computer company. A TV news crew wanted to chat with me on camera.

“Great,” I said. “When do they need me?”

“They’re setting up now. Can you be down in five minutes or so?” was the answer on the other end of the line.

So that’s how I happened to appear on “the telly” in London and throughout the UK last night.

I’ve appeared on BBC TV a few times over the years, most recently in a live shot from its studios on the West Side of Manhattan, but almost never been able to see the segments. This week’s slot on the World Business Report was a little different, as the network streams the show online in Real Video format. But what it doesn’t let you do is save the file as it streams to your computer. So how did I get the video above? Well it was a bit of a hack….

This turned out to be an excuse to try a new program I just learned about called Display Eater which captured the video, sort of. What it appears to have done is capture a long string of still images, which it then converts to a Quicktime video clip.

I thought this was all well and good, until when I played the resulting Quicktime clip and learned that Display Eater doesn’t record audio. Here, the solution was to turn to my favorite, app, Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro which saved the audio stream of my segment into MP3 format.

Armed with a silent video clip and an MP3 sound file of the segment, I poured both into iMove HD, which would have seemed to be a straightforward operation. All I had to do, it seemed was synchronize the sound file and the video file as best I could. Simple right? Wrong.

As interesting and potentially useful as Display Eater is, it doesn’t come close to capturing the full video stream, but more an approximation of it. The result I had was a video clip that was not only out of sync with the audio, but actually shorter than the audio clip that accompanied it.

So at least now you know why the audio and the video are not synced up right.

One interesting bit of trivia about this clip: Steve Jobs appears once late in the segment giving one of the keynotes for which he is famous. But he actually appears twice, though its kind of hard to spot him. Can you guess where it is?