via john robb i ran across a scary report on how drivers that talk on cell phones have slower reaction times and stopping times than those under the influence of alcohol:

"The research said reaction times were, on average, 30% slower when talking on a mobile than when just over the legal limit, and nearly 50% slower than when driving normally."

i'm embarrassed to admit that i've been known to talk on the phone in the car while trying to type an email on my 2-way pager and fish for change for the oh-so-frequent chicago toll booths. yes, i know it's stupid, but's it's amazing how easy it is to get seduced into thinking that your car is just a mobile office.

two brothers who are prussian mercenaries fight in the revolutionary war and marry two North American Indian sisters. the plot for a sunday afternoon movie? no, it's the story behind my last name!

thanks to a distant relative who e.mailed me out of the blue, i now have a great little story to answer the oft-asked question, "did you make up your last name?"

"The story goes, two brothers from Prussia came to this country as hired mercenaries. They settled in the Northeast after the war and married two North American Indian sisters (from the Seneca tribe). The Prussian name was "Schnedahl" or "Schnaudahl". I have seen it spelled both ways. Their new Indian family gave them their new American name "Snowdeal". And there you have it. "

thanks betty!

heh. the social life of paper reminds me of just how obtuse, to an outsider, the logic behond my stacks of paper and articles used to be:

"Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles—piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives."

i don't stack paper anymore. not even at work. i'm not sure why.

[ via webword ]

digital identity world was "soft launched" today and it has some interesting articles, including "Not all Identities were Created Equal" by andre durand :

"There's a big difference between an issued identity and an identity for which an individual has assumed true and unconditional ownership and accountability. This article examines the concept that there are in fact at least three distinct types of identity, for simplicity sake, referred to as Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3. Each of these identities are vastly different in their value to the individual, and the vendors who facilitate their existance."

jason points to singlefile, which looks like a pretty interesting application for organizing and sharing your book collection. i have quit a few books and have been mulling over looking into ways to organize everything for awhile. in fact, just yesterday i was digging through some stuff and found a cuecat scanner just begging to be hooked up with something like webqcat. i see that singlefile has an "isbn auto add" feature. i wonder if there's any way to input isbns with cuecat? hmmm.

so, i banged-out an email to peter saint-andre last night, who's work with jabber the protocol and jabber the company , i've admired for years [ and, in the interest of full disclosure, i might as well admit that peter's surveyor code, um, inspired pixie ]. the initial reason for the e.mail was pretty mundane, he mentioned that he was from maine and since i'm from maine, i thought i'd send a friendly "ayuh" and see if it really is a small world after all. these are the things you do if you're from maine.

much to my surprise, he actually took the time to link to the vast wasteland and bring up a very interesting point about the my recent post on music distribution [ i'd link to the permalink, but blogger has eaten it ] - namely the differences between recording and performance musicians:

"Of course, most musicians make money through performing, teaching, and the like, not recording. But given that I'm in substantial agreement with Glenn Gould about the value of recording over performance, I wonder what free filesharing will imply for the recording musician."

normally in situations like this, i'd fall back on a quote from ian mackaye who is one of my early, early influences [ warning: adult language ]:

"Napster may go by the wayside because it may just sell out. That's apparently what's going on now. But people will continue to find ways to share the music that has affected them. With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music. Fuck 'em."

but that doesn't really count, because ian is the posterchild for a performing musician and doesn't properly reflect the needs of musicians who focus on recording over performing. steve albini kind of gives me something to work with when it comes to recording contracts:

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

but besides being tragically amusing, steve isn't just wedging the recording musician between the proverbial rock of file-sharing and the hard place of recording contracts. hmmm. maybe robert scoble is on to something:

"So, what does the "music stealing" software do for me? Easy, it lets me try music out before I head down to Tower records and buy it.

I don't get why the executives and store owners don't understand this.

I'd buy even MORE music if I had a clue of what I was looking at. For instance, I was looking at the bins the other day and there was a DVD Audio by "Train." Now, I have no clue who Train is, so I didn't buy it. But, I asked around and one of my friends sent me some MP3s and I liked them, so I went down and bought the DVD Audio disk.

That's $25 that the music industry would never have gotten if I wasn't able to check music out before hand.

Is that stealing? Am I a thief? Well, I guess the music industry thinks I am. Hogwash.

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities:

"Despite the decentralized, unorganized, and heterogeneous nature of the web, where millions of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, and goals operate independently, the study shows that the structure of the web self-organizes into communities of related information.

The study shows that a remarkable degree of order emerges from the independent linking actions of individuals."

[ via peter ]

Using XML-Topic Map on a PDA:

"Palm Navigator is a shareware program that is designed to help import an XML/Topic-Map onto a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), and to enable navigation, jumping from one topic to another as easily as Web surfing. Palm Navigator is fully compliant with the ISO Topic Maps standard (ISO/IEC 13250) which enables exchanges between Web sites."

[ via aaronland ]

after months of ignoring signs of impending hard drive failure, i decided it was time to get a new drive and squeeze a few more months out of my aging dual boot wintel/linux box. of course, i don't back anything up. smart. really, really smart. it's funny - i'd almost forgotten that slight tingly sensation that comes about when you do something silly like hose the master boot record. and with a cavalier attitude, you think that the fact that the computer won't boot is no big deal, until you try a few quick fixes. and are still stymied. and then the tingly sensation turns to fear. fear that you're not cavalier. no, it's pretty clear that you're just stupid. and then the sweating starts. but, haha! i fixed everything and am now typing from a machine which is so rejuvinated that i'd say it's down right peppy. so, maybe i'm cavalier after all....or not. hi. ho.