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It Is Winter In Boston, But #YouGottaBeKiddin

We had a dust of snow this morning. Which didn't stop someone claiming dibs on a "pahkin" spot they seemed to have cleared out themselves. By "pahkin theyah cah" on the spot.

From Twitter, via @UniversalHub via @DaveAhern, who wrote, "It's officially winter in Dorchester." He used the hashtag #yougottabekiddin.

I think the American flag guarding the hard-won spot is an especially fine sight. Maybe the flag is -- um -- on the fence (get it?) about the whole pahkin thing.

Why 'Wired' Seems to Have It Wrong About Amazon and Apple

The December 2011 issue of Wired is out, with a photo of the left half of Jeff Bezos' face on the cover.  I was excited about this issue, because I wanted to read about the moves Amazon.com [and my Amazon WishList] is making to be a cloud content provider in addition to seller of books and anything else you can find in a supermarket or shopping mall.

Instead, I was disappointed.

The article by longtime tech writer Stephen Levy repeated some tiresome comparisons between Amazon and Apple. Amazon is content company, right? Because it makes most of its money selling more content things, both real (like books, shoes, and DVDs) and electronic (like ebooks and streaming movies). Yep, it's not a hardware company, though its big news right now is hardware in the form of the Kindle Fire.

And Apple isn't a content company, right?
Because it makes most of its money selling hardware things, like computers and mobile tablets and smartphones. Yes, it's not a content company, even though its current big news is user content management in the form of launching iCloud.

The article also disappointed because all too soon it descends into a Q&A dialog that doesn't grab me. It doesn't talk enough about the Amazon consumer experience and what might be coming down the pike. The most I learn about consumer experiences at Amazon is that Amazon really doesn't like to talk to me on the phone, really is not proud of being a profit-making enterprise, would offer single pricing for movie streaming if, gosh, only the movie content providers would agree, and seems more head-in-the-clouds than futuristic.

There's an ethereal quality to Bezos that bothers me, and I'm trying to put my finger on why.

Jiminy Cricket! So Sorry About That, Cpl. Maxwell Klinger!

An apology. I leaped before I looked. Or wrote before I read.

I recently wrote that I name my tech devices after sidekicks in literature and popular culture. I said that my iPhone 4 was named for Cpl. Maxwell Klinger, the character on M*A*S*H.

Except my iPhone already had a name. I had named it "Jiminy Cricket."

Which, by the way, means that if my sidekick is Jiminy Cricket, I must be Pinocchio.

Under the circumstances, that particular alter ego is appropriate!

 

Meet My Tech Sidekicks: R2-D2, Sancho Panza, Radar O'Reilly, Robin, Sam Stewart, Tonto, and Max Klinger

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Above: Images of the sidekicks after which I have named my computers and smartphones: R2-D2, Sancho Panza, Radar O'Reilly, Robin the Boy Wonder, Samantha Stewart, Tonto, and Max Klinger. (Click on the thumbnail photos in the row on top to switch images.)

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When I was a kid, it was common for families to name their automobiles. This was just as, I suppose, families named their horses up until the 19th and 20th centuries. Which made sense, since horses were animals and they were alive.

But now I feel that my computers are somehow alive, too. At least they're pretty smart, they do my bidding, they look out for me (if I teach them how), and they do seem possessed of certain personalities.

So I name my computers. Many years ago, when I obtained my first laptop, a used Dell Inspiron, I named it "R2-D2," after the character in Star Wars. I thought of R2-D2 as my wing, just as he flew in a round hole on the wing of Luke Skywalker's X-Fighter.

Thus began my personal tradition of naming computers after sidekicks from stage and screen.

Both of my Dell Inspirons were named "R2-D2." My first MacBook laptop was named "Sancho Panza," the sidekick to Don Quixote, the Man of LaMancha. My first iPhone was named "Radar O'Reilly," after the sidekick corporal and company clerk to the commander of the MASH 4077th mobile Army surgical hospital in the movie and TV series "M*A*S*H." (Radar's real name was "Walter.") The second iPhone was named "Robin," after the Boy Wonder sidekick to Batman.

My next MacBook received a name from a British detective series, "Foyle's War." In a first, my computer was named for a female sidekick, Samantha Stewart, who drives and breaks cases for the show's namesake character, Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings, England. So the laptop is graced with Ms. Stewart's more familiar name, "Sam Stewart."

My Mac Mini at the office is named "Tonto," after the sidekick to the Lone Ranger.

'Brave Little State of Vermont' is Devastated by Irene; President Obama Should Visit ASAP

Many people who know Marta and me know that she is quite fond of rural Vermont, and that I fell in love with the state a few years ago during the process of falling in love with her. She owned a home for several years on Lake Ninevah between Mount Holly and Ludlow, and then she spent a year as interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Montpelier, the state's tiny but wonderful capital city.

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Two images below: First image is map captured from Google's Hurricane Season 2011 map center this afternoon showing flood predictions through Sept. 2. Somewhere in that flood-prone blob is the entire state of Vermont. Second image is a photo from the Vermont Today blog showing U.S. Route 7 south of Rutland this morning.

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That's why it hurts to write that Vermont is the Northeastern state that seems to have expected the least from Hurricane-Turned-Tropical Storm Irene but, proportionately speaking, may be suffering the most.

It's really bad up there. It's going to be a time to bravely pull together, which is what the community-minded Vermonters often do well. Entire towns are cut off because of roads -- even major roads like U.S. 4 and U.S. 7 -- have washed away to the point where it's hard to tell they ever existed. Vermont roads tend to be built in the valleys between the mountains, and that's just where the floodwaters go, too. The best engineered highways could not contain the fury of Mother Nature yesterday in Vermont.

They say it's the worst flooding since 1927. That's 84 years ago! Homes and businesses are destroyed. Downtowns are flooded in towns like Waterbury, Ludlow, and Brattleboro. My personal favorite town, the capital city of Montpelier, narrowly escaped a devastating flood had the Mansfield Dam been deliberately breached to let flooding water flow. Just now, the Vermont State Police confirmed another death; three people are now dead out of Vermont's tiny population of fewer than 700,000 people.

It really got to me when I saw a photo gallery from the Burlington Free Press and then read the Vermont Today blog with its own haunting photos.

It got to The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore, too. A native of White River Juction, Vermont, the meteorolgist and broadcasting veteran of dozens of storms was doing a live shot from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan when he stole several minutes with whitecaps in New York Harbor as the background to focus viewers' attention on his Green Mountain home state a few hundred miles away.

I am absolutely heartbroken right now at what I'm seeing coming in right now out of Vermont.

I can't believe these pictures. I mean, this entire state is almost under water. I mean we have bridges that I've been across dozens of times in my life in Quechee, Vermont, that are just being washed away. I just can't believe what I am seeing right now out of my home state. This is just an awful situation. And it's not just Quechee. I mean, Burlington. Up into Ludlow, Vermont. If you remember skiing at Okemo, you go through the little town of Ludlow. And you stop there to get a sandwich, get something to drink.