The reason, simply put, is cruft.

When I copy a post from OpenOffice to WordPress, I invariably get a line at the top that looks like

<!–         @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in }         P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }     –>

I delete that, which according to OpenOffice stats amounts to exactly 100 characters; I fiddle with the bullet points a bit; I add a title, categories, and a MORE separator; and I’m basically good to go.

By way of contrast, in a recent post I copied a sentence from a press release I’d recieved across Google Mail in .DOC format, forgetting to stage it into OpenOffice first.  The cruft I needed to delete consisted of 6489 characters, namely:

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That’s a whole other level of annoying.

Meanwhile, this is as good a time as any to offer lyrics and music/video for the classic Leslie Fish filk song “Banned from Argo.”

Our proper, cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley, where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he’s none the worse for wear
Except he’s somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear

Actually, this version has better sound and image quality, but the video part doesn’t speak to me.

Also:

• A collection of Dr. McCoy clips.
• A song combining Star Trek and The Hobbit.
• A video (large download) to Julia Ecklar’s beautiful song God Lives on Terra, with Star Trek:TNG clips interspersed with views of Wrentham, MA.  (I previously linked a hilarious parody of that song.)
• Another Bob Kanefsky parody song, this one based on a specific Star Trek episode. (Melody and performance by Leslie Fish.)

Overall, the interview went a lot better than my last one with the same station.

I work from my house, as does my wife Linda Barlow. That makes it an interesting place right there, as Linda has published 15 novels, served two terms as a director of the Author’s Guild, testified as an expert witness on HTML technology in Federal court and, for variety, taught neurobiology at a local college. She is also a much better MMO player than I am.

Monday night, however, things got interesting in another way. On the whole, I’m not apt to be particularly celebrity-struck. I grew up in Beverly Hills; worked with bunches of politicians, Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists at Harvard; talk for hours with some of the tech industry’s biggest names; and have met some extremely popular authors through Linda. Still, I thought it was cool to be Twittering back and forth with LeVar Burton, of Roots and Star Trek fame, especially when he sent a direct message that read, in its entirety, “Exactly!!! Well said.” But unfortunately, that wasn’t the most interesting part either.

The flare-up

While I was tweeting away in the middle of the night, I heard a shout from Linda. It turned out that we had a fire on our 49-year-old electric stove. (A burner had failed to turn off, a plastic cutting board had fallen onto it, and flames had started.)

Some lessons from that should be obvious.

We fumbled ineffectively with the fire extinguishers.

Lessons learned:

Make sure you know how to USE your safety equipment. Also, at least try for workarounds on the fly. I should have carried the fire extinguisher outdoors to safety and then worked hard on figuring it out; the fire was small enough I could have still gone back in and extinguished it. Indeed, it was eventually extinguished by a policeman using a similar device, before the fire department ever arrived.

Not doing anything useful with the fire extinguishers, I tried throwing a small amount of water on the fire, just in case what we’d heard about water not helping w/ kitchen fires was wrong. But it turned out to be correct. Perhaps if I’d wetted the cabinets in the line of fire — as it were — the flames’ climb would have been slowed, but I didn’t try that.

Ultimately, all that was destroyed by the flames was the stove itself, some adjacent cabinets, and some contents of same. The real damage from fire turns out to be caused by smoke. Disgusting fire extinguisher powder added greatly to the perceived mess, but probably didn’t actually wreck very many incremental items.

The clean-up

The fire left a small part of our house destroyed, a large part uninhabitable, and the rest uncomfortable. The insurance company happily feels obligated to set things to rights.

The most interesting aspect, I think, is the business process. There is a master contractor called Belfor for restoration, aka remediation, with dozens of offices nationwide. Its employees — who arrived the first afternoon after the fire — do the actual multi-week demolition and clean-up. They subcontract as needed, e.g. for a quick visit by an electrician. Another firm handles all clothes cleaning. A third handles rugs, carpets, and upholstery. All had paid us their first visit by the day after the fire. The insurance adjuster himself arrived the morning of the second day.

There’s a bit of a trend in the auto insurance industry too to move to in-kind services. Auto glass is, I think, commonly handled that way, on a no-fault basis. And some auto insurers, such as Plymouth Rock, handle all repairs themselves.

The benefit to our insurer, Liberty Mutual, is obvious — repeated purchases from specialized suppliers it knows and trusts. Meanwhile, we’re being served by a large and knowledgeable firm, Belfor, that is accountable to another large firm, Liberty Mutual. Not everything is perfect, but the competence/accountability/BS frontier is in a whole different place than I’ve commonly experienced in home contracting scenarios. This is much more of a B2B relationship than it is classical consumer schmooze-and-abuse.

A little bit of cool (or hot) technology

A lot of what’s being done involves saws, sponges, and trash bags. But occasionally an interesting big of electronics pokes through. The most important one was right up front. The fire department has infrared cameras or detectors they use after a fire is apparently out, to confirm that nothing more is smoldering in the walls. This is a huge improvement over the prior technology, which is an ax they used to smash the walls and see for themselves.

I am told that a more advanced version of this is used on water damage sites. How do you detect the source of a leak, which almost always is in a wall, under a floor, or underground? Well, what you’re really trying to detect is an abundance of water. So if there’s any reason for the water to be hotter or cooler than the surrounding structure, an infrared temperature detector may uncover the leak.

Infrared gets mentioned once again in tape-measure-replacement tech. Supposedly, the device is accurate to 1/16th of an inch. My first search engine hit looking for something similar turned up a combo infrared and sonic tool, for $149, advertised at 1/4″ accuracy. Hmm. Cool toy, but I think I have other gadget priorities first.

We also have some heavy-duty air cleaners going, with charcoal adsorption as the core technology. This has already gotten a nod of approval from Linda’s ex-husband, who happens to be an international expert on indoor air pollution.

And yet more

For once, I’m using Twitter the “official” way — briefly updating followers on the state of my life, good and bad alike. I imagine I’ll scale that back soon, for my followers’ sake as well as my own. But for now, I’m giving a bit of a fire-survival play-by-play.

• DBMS2 covers database management, analytics, and related technologies.
• Text Technologies covers text mining, search, and social software.
• Strategic Messaging analyzes marketing and messaging strategy.
• The Monash Report examines technology and public policy issues.
• Software Memories recounts the history of the software industry.

But I actually write a sixth blog too, which has taken over much of the role previously filled by The Monash Report. It also overlaps coverage of internet technologies with Text Technologies.

That is A World of Bytes, which I write for Network World. I use A World of Bytes as my primary outlet for mass-appeal kinds of subjects, such as public policy, e-mail, spam, and the technology of TV football broadcasts. Perhaps the most famous of those posts is this one on online reputation management, because of its last two sentences. I also use A World of Bytes for IT-centric posts on subjects that don’t fit neatly into my more focused blogs, from Oracle application glitches to general software buying practices.

Until a few weeks ago, A World of Bytes had serious UI flaws, which kept me from seriously considering integrating it into my general multi-blog feed. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably subscribed to that, and if not you definitely should be.) But those are now largely fixed.* And so it’s now time to ask:

Would you like to see A World of Bytes integrated into the general “Monash Information Services” RSS feed?

*Obviously, it’s still ad-supported. And the post categorization features are so lame as to be useless. And one paragraph style is still broken as of this writing. But that’s all minor compared to how bad it was before.

I will be guided strongly by your feedback.

Please take a look. (And please overlook the UI at those links.  It’s been embarrasingly bad, especially in the matter of bullet points, ever since I started blogging there, and this month it got a lot worse. I’m sorry.)

Then please help, by advancing your take on these ideas by any means at your disposal.  It’s going to take years to get all this right.  Freedom hangs in the balance.  We need to start NOW.

Discussion is also underway on Slashdot.

It’s been a heckuva week — personal computer crash, Massachusetts’ electrical outage, two-day trip to the UK, and the flu. I’m badly backlogged on email, blog posts, and the holidays.

I’ll catch up as best I can, starting this weekend.

Issues of privacy and liberty take at least five forms:

• Censorship
• Admissible evidence in court
• Admissible evidence in investigations (not exactly the same thing)
• The consequences of damaging information leaks from the government to the private sector
• Potential chill on useful technologies (e.g., electronic health records) caused by any of the other four kinds of issue

Taken together, that amounts to much of the Bill of Rights – or other countries’ equivalents – plus a whole lot of life-saving technology on the side. I.e., it’s more than huge.

That’s from a detailed recent post that ends with a call to action:

Please join me in raising awareness. Blog yourself. Send email to those who might have influence. Or – and this one’s really easy – just go to the suggestion page at www.change.gov and help draw the incoming Administration’s attention toward these crucial issues.

Please, please do at least one of those things. There’s still enough time for freedom to be preserved, since the worst practical threats are still some years off. But if it doesn’t happen during an Obama Administration, when will it happen, in the United States or the rest of the world? The time to make a difference is now.

We’ll zap this interview to the entire Maryland/VA/DC tri-state area. We’ll also stream it live at federalnewsradio.com. And afterwards, we’ll archive it online in its entirety (MP3 format).

Hopefully I’ll get a more precise link to the archive once it’s up, in which case I plan to edit it into this post.

The subject is what Obama should look for in a CTO, and what the Obama Administration’s technology priorities should be. This interview was surely triggered by my post arguing the new United States CTO needs to be more of a CIO, and the Slashdotting of same.

Related links

• MP3 of the interview
• My rant rebutting the attitudes represented by the interviewers
• Freedom even without data privacy

The subject is Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market. (Aka data warehouse DBMS, data warehouse appliance, analytic appliance, or whatever.) I proposed eight ideas that I think work, but they overlap a lot – four are variants on “great price/performance” and three are variants on “the safe choice.” I also called out a few that I don’t think work, including at least one that one of my clients is pretty much betting the company on.

Obviously, there’s a huge amount of research backing up this analysis over on DBMS2. (Just one example – my recent Teradata product line overview.) But I also invoked some underlying marketing theory. Part of that has been posted on Strategic Messaging. Other exists only in very crude draft form. (Sadly, that’s what my whole company website used to look like, until Melissa Bradshaw rescued it.)