I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t make sense what I know, and I know very little. No one can know enough to truly know what’s happening. And if you don’t know, you cannot make choices which depend upon you knowing. In which case, you are forced to fall back on one or both of two strategies: a) principles, or b) greed. Greed may be a principle, if you skew it right. Instead of “principles”, we could say “rules” or “logic”. Doesn’t matter which rules, necessarily, just pick some. Instead of “greed” would could say “instinct” or “intuition”. Most of us follow a combination, heavily biased towards some kind of gut feeling or other, made up of habits, feelings, wishes, and knee-jerk reactions. We’re not machines, after all.

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I’ve all but abandoned pretensions to philosophy. It’s lost its lustre and besides, it’s a pointless exercise unless it keeps you distracted. You can’t prove anything with words.

But you can sometimes amuse yourself with them. I think about what to write and how. I write snippets and snatches. A little fantasy, a little science fiction, a little analysis and criticism, and lots of ideas about times and places and plots and characters.

I’ve convinced myself that the key to telling good lies (sorry, stories) is to imagine characters who believe in something, even if it’s not something in which I personally believe. I suppose it would even suffice to imagine characters who merely want something bad enough to do something about it, as long as it’s something entertaining. Subconscious drive is like the belief of the blood. As to what is entertaining, I’ll only know that after the attempt is made. There’s no accounting and all that.

I will say that I’ve almost completely abandoned all hope for the human race amounting to anything worth a damn. And we’ll be lucky to survive our own success in the coming decades. But I’ll be a rich old man or a guttersnipe, so why worry on’t?

Being pleased that there are people treating something important that I also think might be important is just the recognition of other people being like what I think people should be like: me. It’s disingenuous. It hinges on a doubt: as if there was a possibility that there aren’t people like me in the world, that there is a chance that I am unique and alone. A stupid fear that, like the essence of paranoia, is a disguise for the fact that I want to be unique.

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It’s time to start thinking about how to break back out of the browser. It’s time to re-imagine the Web as a source of data, not a repository of documents or a dynamic page layout system. A software interface is not a document, or vice versa. It’s time to separate the documents from the containers, and the containers from the applications. It’s time to use the right technology for each component of the system.

We’re getting close. Right now, the document is HTML, and the application is javascript, but the application is embedded in the document. Does that make any sense? The layout is the CSS, but the CSS describes the document, which is the structure of the HTML, but it’s also the structure of the application interface: the menus, the buttons, the text fields, the tables.

The application should be assembled not out of document elements, but out of user interface elements already present on the host operating system. Then the style can once again be focussed on the documents which the application displays. And other kinds of data, like tables and hierarchies and other heavily structured data, can be displayed using native user interface elements expressly designed for data of that sort.

A browser, in the Web sense, was created to display documents. Certainly, some documents contain more structured data, but a document is meant to be a static thing. An application is dynamic. An application is not a document, and a document is not an application. We have dedicated incredible resources to making them the same thing, now to the point of even subverting the continuity of the document to make it behave like an application, and at the same time we’ve made a mess where every application looks and feels different and alien compared to every other.

The web is a mess. Because whereas unlike desktop software, where there are rules and guidelines and established ways of doing things, there is chaos and disorder and countless re-inventions of the wheel, most of them inferior knockoffs and knockoffs of knockoffs. And most of them trying to use a document display technology as an application interface, and failing miserably.

The time has come (in fact, it came a long time ago, and its been waiting patiently for us to notice) to throw off the shackles of http and html and embedded web applications, and disentangle the streams of document data, document style, application data and application interface specification from the garbled spew which is the typical web (2.0) site. It’s time to write new data publishing protocols for the fast, efficient, and de-coupled delivery of highly structured binary and non-document textual data, and binary user interface description specification data. It’s time to put the code for user interface processing back into standardized, native code.

It’s time to treat documents like documents, data like data, and applications like applications.

The browser is a monstrosity. Let’s get over it.

Now we’re in the strange state between major projects—at least, some of us are. A few of the engineers have already started another project. I’m not completely sure what I’m working on next. I still have a few bugs to fix and there was one feature that isn’t quite finished… I’m sure I’ll be knee-deep in something new and cool soon enough. Now I’m just finally trying to catch my breath. I had a bonus vacation week a couple of weeks ago, but it was so soon after launch that I was really just working shorter hours from home, at least for the first few days. I’m not really a workaholic, but it’s not easy to completely let go, either, especially when “work” is something you’ve helped build from scratch.

Six weeks from now, Apple’s WWDC is happening again in San Francisco. The entire Marketcircle engineering team is going, which is pretty amazing. I haven’t been since 2004, when I went—for the second time—on a student scholarship. Nowadays it’s overrun with iPhone developers, which is cool, I guess, but I expect I’ll be sticking to obscure stuff of significance to servers, networking, data storage and programming languages. Maybe I’ll find room for one or two iPhone sessions and one or two user interaction sessions. I always like the Mac OS X and Cocoa State of the Union presentations, where they summarize the road maps and new technologies. Bertrand Serlet always does a great show.

Obama is probably going to be a somewhat rerun of the Clinton years, hopped up on the Internet. I can foresee a lot energy and activity going into running websites and issuing updates and general communications frenzies, but I’m skeptical that all that information flying around between citizens and their government will have a significant impact on how the U.S. government actually operates.

The predicament in which the United States finds itself has a lot more to do with the attitudes of its people than with the actions of its government. Obama won by 4% of the popular vote. This is not “overwhelming”, except in the most cynical interpretation. I fully expect that in the mid-terms in two years, the American people will flip the balance back towards the Republicans, ensuring once again a paralysis in government and a stagnancy in political ideas.

What the United States needs is another revolution. I’d prefer a bloodless one, but even a civil war might be better for them, and the rest of the world, in the long run. But they certainly need less television, less fast food, less plastic, and fewer cars. They need an economy that runs on something other than conspicuous consumption (as does Canada and the rest of the world). Sadly, consumerism, capitalism and democracy are a kind of locked-in trinity of short-term thinking driven mostly by fear, uncertainty and doubt. It panders always and inevitably to one human quality: insecurity.

Change may come to the Insecure States of America, but I suspect it will be shallow, superficial, and cosmetic. Because that’s all the American consumer will tolerate. Don’t think that lipstick-smeared pigs are gone for anything but a short recess.

Hyper-focus is for technical ideas. Currently, I put almost all of my hyper-focus effort into work, which is usually both private and overly technical (read: boring). I’ve got another blog for technical writing, but I never blog there, either. If I worked on something open source, or if I did user-level design, I’d probably be more of a mind to write about it. I don’t want to talk about the research and new development work I do, because it gives my company a competitive advantage. And I’m not comfortable expressing my opinions about our products from a user point of view. I don’t know enough about them, and it’s not where my enthusiasm lies.

Wide focus is for philosophy, social commentary, and cultural criticism. Also boring to the vast majority of people, but more importantly, I’m not even amateur rank in the areas I’m exploring. At best, I can mention what I’m reading about, maybe summarize some of the ideas. I haven’t encountered anything new, lately. Mostly I’ve been reading predictions about how various resource depletion issues may affect our civilization in the next ten to a hundred years. I’ve grown wary of predictions, after reading so much science fiction for so long. The only thing I have any confidence in is the ability of the future to defy all expectations.

I don’t spend cycles on in-between stuff. I read a lot but don’t seem to form the right kind of opinions for sharing. Medium-level stuff just isn’t important enough to get excited over. And I hate blogging about my personal life. I’m only interested in writing about ideas. Medium-level stuff includes all those opinions about products, entertainment and special interest politics which fills up almost everything out in the blog-o-sphere. Medium-level stuff is what kills real progress in the ability of humans to understand their world better. Of course, the purpose (or aim or desire) of most human beings is not to understand their world better. But it is mine.

So, every time I try to think of something to write, I think “I’m not Google”. If people want to learn about something, they have other places to go.

And yet I like writing, and want to find something to write about, other than trying to find something to write about. I guess I just have to sit down to write more often. Maybe I’ll figure out my take on things in the middle.

I don’t need a TV, but the one we have is dying, and I like watching movies. Sometimes I watch broadcast television. I don’t have cable or satellite. I despise telecom companies, and have no use for the vast majority of television programming. What I like, I watch on DVDs (I rent from Film Fest Video on Duplex north of Eglinton in mid-town Toronto).

I got the TV and player online; they’ll be delivered on Wednesday, probably. Means I’ll have to work from home New Year’s eve. Tomorrow I’ll go down to College Street and find HDMI and optical cables so I can actually use them, and then maybe buy or rent a couple of Blu-Ray discs. Kim says she’s going to buy the Planet Earth boxed set. That is a worthy purchase, I think. Maybe I’ll buy Blade Runner. It now makes sense to own movies that have real photographic artistry.

I don’t buy many movies. I download some. I think I would like to be part of a Blu-Ray rental club. I don’t really want to “own” movies, nor do I want to download massive Blu-Ray movie files and store them or burn my own copies.

As much as I hate consumer culture, I’m a product of my generation. But if I like consuming anything, it is information. And I still like books the best. But that’s probably just how my brain is wired.

The world is at war. And it is being fought over a single driving disagreement: who gets to have a better life. And there are only two points of view.

The first point of view is that a minority of people get to have a better life. There is endless disagreement over which minority, but taken together, it is the majority view that a minority deserve to have a better life.

The other point of view is that everyone deserves to have a better life.
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