The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for July 2008

We Still Carry The Pain of Our Past Part II

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Following the completion of the last post I had intended to go to sleep, but I had a thought that I had felt like sharing. One of the things that I like about blogging is that to a certain extent it levels the playing field of life.

Out here in cyberspace you are not judged upon your looks, who you know, where you went to school or any of the million little things people use to assess and categorize each other. That is not to say that we are freed from being evaluated, not at all.

But there is something nice about participating in something in which you know that some of the more superficial things are removed. The blog you are reading might be written by the stud, the loser, the Prom King, the nerd or that quiet neighbor no one knows.

Our here in cyberspace you get the chance to interact with everyone. Out here in cyberspace the pain of our past doesn’t have to haunt you as it does in the so called real world. No one knows if you stutter or smell.

All we know is what we read and the image that we compose of the author and I kind of like it. What do you think?

We Still Carry The Pain of Our Past

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Another day has come and gone. The sun has risen, the sun has set. The end of the second day. As is my custom I went to my second shul and davened on the court of Spaulding, Nike and Reebok. There I bore witness to the pain and shame of the past for myself and for others.

If you’re new to the blog let me help you catch up. I play pick up basketball three or four days a week. I use that and this blog as my therapy. It is where I blow off steam and try to forget about the challenges of the day.

Most of the time I prefer to play three-on-three or four-on-four, but every now and then I’ll run a couple of games of full court. Unless you play in the league the teams aren’t prepared in advance. We just split ’em up and have at it, well that’s the theory.

The thing is that no one wants to lose so people try to do what they can to stack the teams. And as you might imagine there are players that people really don’t want on their team because they just aren’t good enough.

So what happens is that you sometimes get to witness the harsh reality of the elementary school playground all over again. Guys can be isolated and outcast. To be clear I have also seen some great moments in which people intentionally grabbed the less talented players and took them under their wings.
My friends, that is a mosaic of the black eye I received from one of the guys I play ball with. He was on my own team. Quite a teammate, isn’t he.

On a serious note he is one of those guys who moves around on the fringe. He has some severe emotional issues, isn’t particularly coordinated and has been hospitalized on a number of occasions. I know about his medical situation because he has boundary issues and shares things that he probably shouldn’t offer so readily.

Most of the guys prefer not to play with him, because it is just too easy to get hurt. I have to be honest and include myself in that group. If I can avoid it I do, but sometimes I feel badly about it. Not just because of him, but a few other guys as well.

As we divide ourselves up you can see the anxious look in their eyes. They’re nice guys, but they are just terrible players. Maybe I am projecting too much, but I suspect that they have had a lifetime of being picked last or not picked at all.

It makes me feel awkward. We’re not children. We pay to belong and most guys just want to have a good game to take their mind’s off life’s challenges. It is not really our responsibility to try and make everyone feel good. There are times when I want to pick them, where I’d like to help make them smile by helping them.

Sometimes I have spoken up and done something and sometimes I have just stayed silent. Like I said, we’re grown ups now. There have been times at the gym where I didn’t get picked because the guys didn’t think that I was good enough to play with them either.

But after more than 20 years of playing there it doesn’t happen often. I usually play with the same group of guys so I am often guaranteed a space. To be clear, these guys on the fringes can always get into a game. It is not that they are completely frozen out of playing, but that can be a small consolation.

I suppose that what I am really saying is that the court isn’t so different from the real world. Sometimes it is a place where the layers are pulled back and you see that we still carry the pain of our past.

SezWho- Trying Out a New Service

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I decided to test a service called SezWho. Here is a short blurb about them:

“SezWho is a universal profile service for the social web that improves community engagement and enables content discovery to be added to blogs, forums, message boards and other social sites. SezWho works with most social media platforms without taking over the content on the site.”

We’ll give it a day or two and see what happens. Feel free to leave your own feedback as to whether you think it is a useful tool or not.

Plumbing Problems

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One of the best parts of the weekend is the opportunity to take care of household chores. There is nothing that I like to do better than to clean up the garage, remove clutter and do the 1,987,862 other things on the list.

This weekend I received the gift of a backed up shower/tub. It is one of those things that I get to deal with once or twice a year. Dependent upon which shower backs up I can identify the source of the problem as being either tree roots or an accumulation of hair courtesy of the long haired ladies who reside here.

My initial solution to this sort of thing is try and clear the drain myself. I have a snake that I sometimes use or every now and then I may try a chemical solution. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

This time around I decided that I wanted to try a different approach. So I went out and purchased a hydraulic drain flusher that is similar to that shown in the picture here. It is a simple concept. Attach it to a water source and use hydraulic power to force the clog to clear.

Sounds good. Looks like it should work. Only in my case it didn’t. We went from experiencing a slow draining shower/tub to a very…….very…..very…..slow draining shower/tub. It always warms the cockles of my heart to see that the solution has backfired and is going to cost more time and money.

So now I am waiting for my rooter guy and his massive snake to come clean it all out. Of course I looked into renting a snake and found out that it was ten dollars cheaper than having the rooter guy come here.

BTW, did I mention that he said that he’d be here two hours ago. It is ever so gratifying to see that my time is so valuable to him.

Cuil Takes On Google

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If you spend any time reading the news you have probably come across Cuil. It is among the many contenders that have been trying to oust Google from their throne as king of search engines. They do have some things going for them that others don’t.

Let’s take a quick look at what the media reports. Here is a blurb from CNN/Money:

“SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable – only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

Web index: For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.”

I suppose that you could say having Google purchase your technology gives you a certain cachet. But then again you could say that the purchase is also a way to stifle competition. For now I’ll take the former approach and say that Patterson knows what she is doing.

Rafe Needleman offers a review of Cuil here.

“What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.” On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. “We have a strong ontological commitment,” Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.

The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google’s.

Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.

Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”

It’s one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.”

I agree with assessments that say that it is going to be hard to unseat a behemoth like Google whose brand recognition is unmatched. However, nothing stays the same forever.

Part of what I enjoy about technology is how fast it can change. If companies don’t work hard to stay ahead of the curve and to provide value they will find themselves in serious trouble.

If Cuil delivers what they promise they have an excellent chance to become a serious player.