Paul's Down-Home Page

IBM struck first, with their announcement of Sametime 7.5. The new version offers support for BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices, as well as Office and Outlook integration. It’ll be interesting to see how good a job IBM did of these features, given that Microsoft has set an awfully high bar with the Office 2003+Communicator+LCS 2005 stack. (one disquieting note: IBM’s SIP gateway apparently requires WebSphere. I hate it when that happens!)

Microsoft’s announcement is scheduled for a little later today. I’ll have more details on today’s announcements once the embargo’s lifted; check back here. Update: here are my notes on the MS announcement.

In the meantime, there’s an article in the New York Times by John Markoff that goes to great lengths to pooh-pooh what Microsoft’s doing (quoting Ken Bisconti and Julie Farris, along with Huntsville homeboy Mark Spencer of Digium) and talking about the complexity of a feature set that, based on the rest of the article, Markoff doesn’t quite understand yet. The article freely muddles the already-announced unified messaging support in Exchange with the stuff set to be announced today, but it does such a poor job of describing both that I felt dumber after reading it.

Terrific post by Barry Eisler on time management:

I’ve done 15 signings in the last two weeks, and a lot of people have asked for advice on how to write a novel. I tell them, “Don’t watch television.”

There’s a common misconception that novels get written in a mad rush over a month or two in an isolated cabin or on a mountain top. They don’t. They get written an hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years (eight years, in the case of my first novel, Rain Fall).

“An hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years”… well, that’s exactly how people watch television, isn’t it?

There are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in our lives. If you use those daily hours doing one thing, you can’t use them for something else. It’s that simple.

Now, of course, I could self-righteously puff out my chest and crow about how little television I watch… but that’s not the point. If I were to take the amount of time I spend reading other peoples’ novels, I’d certainly have time to write one (or more, given how much I read). Of course, that says nothing about the amount of time I spend doing other entertaining but ultimately non-productive things.

Interestingly, my first several computer books were all written in exactly that way: an hour or two at a time, every night after the kids were in bed. As we added more children, and as they grew, our lives changed, and so did my job; I was able to write full time, every day. Now I’m back to writing columns, articles, and so on in bits and pieces, whenever I can find time. For example, this morning I got up at 0500 and spent about two hours working on a paper. Tonight after the kids are in bed, I’ll probably work on a different paper. I guess I should start thinking seriously about whether I want to try writing long fiction (I think I do), and whether I have any interesting stories to tell (well, the jury’s out on that one.)

What a great weekend!

First, Friday afternoon I took the boys over to Mom & Dad’s for a swim. The pool wasn’t 100% full, but that didn’t bother them in the least; they were happy to splash around like animals at the watering hole. That night Arlene and I went to Cohen & Cook, one of our favorite restaurants . We had an excellent dinner, but when we came home discovered that our bed was swarming with little tiny red ants. That didn’t sit well with my dear wife, so we stripped the bed and decamped to the guest bed. (I think they were Allegheny mound ants, but I’m not 100% sure.)

Saturday I ran some errands with the boys and put a coat of paint on the upper part of the entryway, thanks to some welcome help from Tim.

Sunday the boys surprised (sic) me with breakfast in bed. Unfortunately, I had to get out of bed and eat at the table to prevent a recurrence of AntFest. At church, I had the day off from teaching my class of 8- and 9-year-olds; instead, I got to go to our elders’ quorum meeting, where two of my favorite people (hi, John and Ben!) were ordained as elders in the Melchizedek Priesthood. It was really powerful to be in the room as their fathers ordained and blessed them– something I very much look forward to doing with my own sons when they’re of age.

We had a light lunch, then the boys gave me some Fathers’ Day loot: a new Nikon Coolpix S6 6MP camera that has built-in WiFi and some other nifty features, a wall mount for our living room projector, and a bottle of Task, a locally-made cleaner/degreaser. Arlene cooked a big turkey breast with rice, gravy, peas, and lemon lush; to top things off, we watched a movie called Duma about a young South African boy who has some excellent adventures while returning a baby cheetah to the wild. I’d never heard of it before, but it was quite good.

Today, alas, it’s back to normal…