Lincoln Highway Book Tour — San Francisco style

[Cover of Lincoln Highway Book] After work today, I made my way up to Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building to catch the endpoint of the tour for the new book, The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate, by Michael Wallis and Michael Williamson. The Lincoln Highway was the first road across America, yet lately it has languished while Route 66 gets the glory.

However, just as Mr. Wallis’ 1992 book, Route 66: The Mother Road, helped revive national interest in that historic highway, I’m hopeful that the Michaels’ new book will spark new life in the “Father Road.” Already, it’s gotten huge press, from the New York Times to KCBS AM. They’re even going to be on The Colbert Report, and Bill O’Reilly has also expressed interest in interviewing them.

[LHA Logo]I asked the authors why they decided to write a book on the Lincoln Highway — hadn’t Wallis already covered similar ground with Route 66? Mr. Wallis said he was “tired of the Lincoln Highway being referred to in the past tense.” Mr. Williamson said that lots of people have traveled Route 66, and now they want something different. The Lincoln Highway provides that opportunity.

Being the webmaster of the Lincoln Highway Association gave me huge street cred: as I was getting my book signed, Michael Williamson turned to Michael Wallis and said, “He’s the real deal.”

[Lincoln Highway Book Tour] I’ve posted my photos of the book tour in my Flickr account, including my photo with the authors, when Michael Wallis told me I was “the safest man in San Francisco” at that time.

By the way, for dinner I went to Mistral Rotisserie Provençale in the Ferry Building and got a ¼ roast chicken with broccoli and potatoes for $7.75. Not super cheap, but well worth it.

The joy of Wikipedia

As a kid I used to read the encyclopedia (yes, my nerdiness goes way back), so Wikipedia is truly a joy. Not only can I read it, I can also improve it. Most of my edits have been in subjects I initially know little about but have some strange interest in.

I have an unusual capacity to remember the twists and turns of corporate history, such as the whole Citigroup/Travelers saga. So when I saw the skimpy history section that the Travelers article had, I had to jump in and help out. I also created the article for Capgemini, one of the world’s largest consulting companies, after seeing a sign for “Cap Gemini Ernst & Young” in Cupertino and trying to figure out what the heck that was. In this case, I just created a stub, and thankfully the rest of the Wikipedia community filled it in.

I’ll also do articles of local interest. For example, I heavily rewrote the article on Vallco Fashion Park, now Cupertino Square. Just today, I was reading about Mineta San Jose International Airport, and I knew something was wrong when its history section started in the early 1980s. So I couldn’t resist doing a little research and adding a paragraph about how the airport really started, in 1939.

Spiritual computing

Today I attended a talk on “spiritual computing” by Dr. Craig Warren Smith, who works at the Human Interaction Development Laboratory at the University of Washington. Since spiritual computing isn’t well defined, much of his talk was devoted to examples, followed by a definition, which frankly I didn’t have enough time to absorb.

What I did get out of Dr. Smith’s talk is that spiritual and religious traditions have a lot to say about what is meaningful to people, that they have developed a lot of technology over thousands of years to further their spiritual goals (he called mass the “killer app” of Catholicism), and the computing field should tap into that knowledge as it designs its products. Unfortunately, we didn’t get into many specifics, although Dr. Smith did mention mindfulness, where a person becomes completely aware of his or her thoughts and actions at the present moment, which comes from Buddhism.

Overall, a thought-provoking and worthwhile talk.

My life in bite-sized nuggets

As usual, I haven’t blogged as much as I’d like, but I have been regularly uploading my photos, so my Flickr photostream is a better representation of my life than my blog. Here’s what I’ve done since my trip to Orlando:

Trip to Taiwan during Chinese New Year. It was great seeing a lot of my relatives, as well as playing tourist in Tainan and Kaohsiung.

Trip to Rochester, New York. It’s not your typical tourist destination, but I was born there and one of my friends was studying there, and I had frequent flyer miles to burn. It felt good to revisit my roots, even though it was snowing in April.

Meeting up with friends. This includes a dinner with high school friends, my 10th-year Caltech reunion, Jonathan and Polly’s wedding, ice skating, and CHI.

Lots of hiking. We’ve visited a lot of places I’d never been to before, such as Sweeney Ridge, San Bruno Mountain, Crystal Springs Park, and St. Joseph’s Hill.

Currently, we have a family friend visiting us from Taiwan. She said she wanted to go see the Gay Pride Parade last Sunday, which I’d never been to. My reaction: I really enjoyed it. I was struck by the sheer joy of the people in the parade — you could tell they were so happy to just be themselves, that they didn’t need to hide who they were. The crowds weren’t too bad, since they were spread out along Market Street, and we took BART in to avoid the driving madness. On the other hand, the parade is really long, about 3½ hours. I would go again, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t gone to go! But now that I’ve seen the whole parade once, I’d only stay for maybe the first 1½ hours the next time. (8/6/07 update: I’ve posted my parade photos.)

Song of the moment: “Something About You” by Level 42. An ’80s classic, and Level 42’s only U.S. hit.

More on Rich Internet Applications

There are a few players I didn’t mention in my previous post on Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo has its own framework for building Flash-based apps, and they have plans to make their framework target Ajax as well.

Which brings me to the one platform I think has the best chance of winning: the web itself. HTML and JavaScript-based applications may be a pain to write, but it’s slowly getting easier, as evidenced by the dozens of Ajax libraries that have sprung up over the past two years.

I see the rise of the web as an application platform similar to the rise of the PC. At first, the PC was absolutely pathetic compared to its more powerful cousins: RAM measured in kilobytes, cassette drives for storage, operating systems that didn’t support subdirectories. But slowly and erratically the PC improved over time, until it ate companies like Digital for lunch.

The same is going on with the web. At first, HTML was pretty impoverished compared to desktop operating systems. No persistent storage, no drag-and-drop… I remember when web pages all had gray backgrounds and when you couldn’t even fill out forms. But all of these capabilities have slowly been added, and now web applications are vastly more capable than they were five years ago.

Isn’t Ajax kinda ugly? Sure! So are the x86 architecture and the Win32 API, but those aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the web.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep evolving. There are two efforts that could greatly improve the current state of affairs: HTML 5 and JavaScript 2. HTML 5 adds features like offline data, while JavaScript 2 includes some badly needed features such as a consistent packaging mechanism and class-based OOP (which may or may not be a good idea). Whether they are successful depends largely on whether Microsoft bothers to implement them well in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft is participating in both projects, so there is some hope.

So I believe HTML and JavaScript will continue to dominate over any other RIA platform. Microsoft’s actions with Internet Explorer will help determine how smoothly we get to that future.