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Doug
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Doug
It’s a little hard for me to believe, but I’m over halfway done with my real estate licensing class. What’s even harder to believe is that I’m really enjoying it.
A lot of my enjoyment is due to the instructor, who is not only very experienced (30+ years selling real estate), but an excellent trainer. Too often, those two things don’t go together - as anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of trying to puzzle out what a brilliant, but inarticulate college professor knows.
I’m also learning a great deal, and that’s the real clincher for me. Typically, I do a lot of self-teaching. I have a hard time in “butts-in-seats” classroom settings for a whole host of reasons, and so usually refrain by placing myself in those settings by just setting out to learn things myself. It’s the rare situation that I find myself drawn into a class the way I’ve been in this one.
Much of the curriculum has to do with basic business literacy and business law, most of which I’m pretty familiar with. This is the tough part for many of my classmates, though, because they generally haven’t been exposed to it. That’s unfortunate, but grappling with those concepts gets in the way of understanding what I consider to be the really interesting stuff, most of which has to do with the nuances of putting together real estate deals.
It turns out real estate is every bit as geeky as computer science, just in a different way. Real Estate even has it’s own set of arcane terminology and buzz words, just like IT. There are, in fact, some really interesting parallels between putting together a real estate deal and managing a software development project, once you strip away all the fluff and look at the process. Real estate just has a longer history to draw from, and a deeper bank of experience to help iron out the bumps.
A few weeks ago in class, we were discussing the common-law concept of agency, something that’s very critical in understanding one’s role as a licensee and in keeping yourself out of trouble. As we talked about it, I was struck by how closely the world of software agents parallels the “real world” definitions of the types of agency one encounters in business.
There are special, or limited agents (which is what a real estate agent usually is), who are empowered to perform one particular task, and only that task, for their principal. This seems to map very well to the sorts of agents we typically deal with on the web today, which are limited to a single purpose, like helping us perform searches or compare two products. They’re optimized to do one thing, and only that one thing, well. When you think about it, a good real estate agent is sort of like Google for buying or selling property. Sure, you could do it yourself if you had to, but you’re apt to do it more efficiently, quickly, and correctly if you use the special agent.
Then there are general agents; people who are empowered to manage an entire area of business or set of transactions for their principal, i.e. a Property Manager. General agents seem to me to be more like the sort of agents we hear about in connection with the Semantic Web. A software agent that manages your schedule for you, for example, is a lot like the common-law general agent.
Finally, there’s such a thing as an universal agent - a person empowered to make any and all decisions for their principal, who can, in effect, be the principal in terms of representation and decision-making. Universal agents are like those science fiction software agents that incorporate AI and avatars and the like to represent a person online so the main character in the story can be someplace else and do other things.
Maybe this was always obvious to people who muck with software agents for a living. I found the parallels interesting.
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Doug
Shortly after writing yesterday’s post on dashboard, I ran across Michael McCraken’s port of the Remem remembrance agent for Emacs to OS X. The good news - this port doesn’t require emacs to work, rather, it watches Cocoa text objects and suggests associations based on whatever you’re currently working on in any Cocoa program.
The bad news (for me) is that it’s Cocoa only, meaning it doesn’t work with Tinderbox, which is where I do most of my writing. On the upside, the indexer indexes Tinderbox files (which are XML, after all), so the program should indicate associations within Tinderbox outlines when I’m working in other applications. That’s possibly more valuable to me than having it provide me with associations in Tinderbox, since Tinderbox acts as my main database, and I’m more likely to want to be reminded of stuff that’s already in there when I’m doing something else.
The really bad news is that this is a developer release, and I couldn’t get it to actually work. The UI displays, and I can index my documents with the indexer from the command line, but the controller application doesn’t allow me to associate indexes with the application itself. Basically, it doesn’t do anything at all. I recompiled everything from scratch just in case it was something specific to my system, but no joy.
Still, it bears watching. Note that there’s no (functioning) permalink to the post that describes the software. You’ll need to search the page for ‘remembrance.’
Michael indicates that http://disco.ucsd.edu/blog/computers/mac/programming/XRADevRel1.html is a permalink to the item linked above. Thanks Michael!
Update 7/8/2003 to add permalink.
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Doug
A couple of years ago I wrote about a remembrance agent for Emacs. Yesterday, I came across a new project Nat Friedman of Ximian is working on, building a remembrance agent for the Linux desktop, called dashboard.
One of the things I’ve been hacking on with a high level of intermittence is my dashboard idea. The basic notion is automatic search of your personal information space as you go about your regular daily activities: reading and writing email, browsing the web, talking to people on IM (at least, these are my regular daily activities).
As you interact with a given object (an email, a web page, a person on IM), the dashboard is supposed to automatically populate with nice, visual representations of related objects in your little universe. And then, of course, there are various ways that you can do things with those objects: click to open or activate them, drag and drop them onto another application, etc.
Judging by his latest screenshot, he’s made some significant progress.
The big deal about remembrance agents is that they act as an aid to associative memory, unlike query-based search agents, which aid direct recall. A remembrance agent helps you make connections from what you’re currently working on to other facts and information that isn’t necessarily “top of mind” to the current task - hence fostering increased creativity and a deeper understanding of relationships.
Remembrance agents are a key to the class of software that I think will truly revolutionize how humans interact with computers. To date, nearly all software has focused on automating tasks. Through computer mediation, we may perform those tasks in new ways and perhaps more efficiently, but we’re not really doing much that we couldn’t do before. We just do it faster. Automation doesn’t make us any smarter. In fact, one of the chief virtues/traps of automation is that it often “helps” us make mistakes faster. This can be good or bad depending on the scenario, but it doesn’t change the fundamental process.
I think the next great leap in human/computer interaction involves augmentation. Remembrance agents aren’t simply automating a task, but rather act as a means of increasing our organic ability to make connections and see patterns in information. I’m not doing a great job of explaining this, but my sense is that there’s a fundamental difference between the sort of thing accomplished by a word processor or a web browser and something like a remembrance agent.
The other day I jokingly asked Mark Bernstein if the direct brain interface for Tinderbox was coming in version 1.4 or if we’d have to wait for version 2.0. In retrospect, I was only half joking - while I’m not necessarily that keen on having a computer jacked directly into my skull, I really do want tools like Tinderbox to act more in the capacity of augmentation than automation. Through various agents and views I use Tinderbox as something like a “flint ax” remembrance agent today. By including links to external documents, e-mail, and chat transcripts into my Tinderbox databases, I’ve extended these its associative abilities outside the bounds of Tinderbox itself to at least part of my file system. As long as I’m working in Tinderbox, at least some associative augmentation ability is there - but that disappears as soon as I leave it for another application. I want that capability to be as pervasive as the WiFi that bathes my house and office.
Nat indicates that Microsoft will be including remembrance agent capabilities at the core of Longhorn; that this is in fact their play for challenging Google. If this in fact the case, I think they’re on to something significant. Someone at Microsoft clearly understands that this is the next great leap - witness the direction of their research through projects like MyLifeBits. Now, consider the power of having a database of your entire life coupled with an agent that can recall and present associated events, documents and people depending on your current task, without any conscious intervention on your part. Then make it mobile, pervasive, and inter-connected with other people, and databases of other sorts of information. Do that, and I suspect we may find some pretty strange stuff happening.
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Doug
Our reputation for rough weather was borne out again today. Around 5:00 PM the storms I’d seen building all afternoon finally rolled in. Nor was this your common, garden variety summer thunderstorm, either. I’ve seldom in my life seen sheets of rain that rivaled these. At peak, I’d estimate we were seeing wind gusts of 45-50 MPH.
Ten minutes or so into the storm, just as the TV was telling us we were about to be hit with the worst part, there was an astonishingly loud clap of thunder followed immediately by the lightning’s flash. I mean immediately, not a second or two later, but simultaneous with the thunder. It rattled the windows and scared my daughter half out of her skin.
I did a quick check and everything around the house seemed fine. I was pretty certain that we’d had a strike right here in the neighborhood, so I packed the kids off to the basement, and stuck my head out the door to see if all was well outside. Frankly, at that point I wasn’t certain that our house hadn’t been hit.
Our house was fine, but as soon as I opened the door I smelled smoke. The rain was driving down so hard I had trouble making out houses even two or three houses away, but the smell of smoke was getting stronger. Grabbing a jacket, I sprinted out into the storm.
It turned out a neighbor’s house had been hit. Fortunately, no one was home, and a neighbor had already called 911 by the time I arrived, rain-soaked, in front of the house. I went back up to the corner by my house to wave the trucks in, which turned out to be a good thing, since two of them sped by the street where the house was burning and I had to yell at them to get them stopped and turned around.
Here’s a shot of the house once the full complement of fire crews showed up:
It didn’t take long for the fire fighters to get things under control after they arrived. The rain stopped, but lightning continued to crash and flare all around through the next hour or so.
After coming back inside and drying off, I discovered I no longer had Internet connectivity. A bit of investigation revealed that the entire LAN side of my Linksys router was fried, apparently by the same lightning strike. The garage door openers didn’t work, either, and it looks like the NIC card in Terri’s desktop machine is toast, too. I bought a new router, and power-cycling the garage door openers seems to have solved that problem. The NIC card will have to wait until tomorrow.
Right now, some yahoo in the next neighborhood over is running off a couple thousand bucks in fireworks. He’ll have to hurry, the lightning is flashing and another storm is on the way in…
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Doug
I’ve posted a bunch of pics from the Carmel Fourth of July parade over at Erehwon Moblog.
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Doug
Matthew Dennis muses on the lessons of life as taught by 4-H. The cynicism expressed in this post made me feel all warm and fuzzy:
We took on the Marion County Fair last night. Specifically, we took on the Pig Show at the Marion County fair and I was struck by the cruelty and humility involved in the 4-H process. Not the animal cruelty — I’m all for bacon and ham and pork chops — but the cruelty to the kids. The common belief is that 4-H teaches children responsibility and animal husbandry. Not so! The real goal of 4-H is to teach children about the fundamental unfairness of life and society…
…The upshot: The pig show at the fair serves to teach 4-H kids that life is generally out of their control and up to a bunch of subjective events. And each individual is not very important in the grand scheme of things.
And, did I mention that they sell the pigs at the end of the fair for meat?
I’m surprised there’s not a follow-up group called 4-AA. My advice for any kid showing pigs at the fair is to raise the meanest pig they can. Beat it daily and feed it nothing but pulled pork and whiskey. Sharpen it’s teeth. When you hit the ring, it’s go-time. Your pig will look a lot better when the judge is comparing it to a bunch of broken, bloody, and scared pigs. Now that’s a blue ribbon animal.
I think taking this a step further and feeding the kid nothing but pulled pork and whisky may have a lot of merit.
On a personal note, trying to get anything done business-wise on the day before a holiday weekend is something of an exercise in futility. I did have one very productive meeting this morning, but between nearly everyone else being on vacation and my own flagging enthusiasm for continuing to work today, I suspect it may be time to throw in the towel for the day.
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Doug
Serious doubts seem to be developing among both users and developers over whats going on with (not-)Echo:
Mark Bernstein: I’ve been reassuring everyone in sight that Echo would work out. Now, I’m not sure. I’m worried that it’s veering off the rails.
All of a sudden, it seems that echo wants to discard all the current posting methods (based on XML-RPC) in order to use a different protocol (SOAP), That’s going to be a significant nuisance for developers. Maybe that’s the agenda?
Thus far, the opposition includes Tinderbox, RadioUserland, NetNewsWire, and Archipelago…
MacNetJournal: All of this is too boring to dwell on in MNJ, but people need to realize that making drastic changes to weblogging tools for what appear to be minimal gains will have an effect on end users as well as those who build the technology that makes all of this work. Creating a proprietary format now sounds like a big waste of time…
I continue to be very wary of this entire thing. Something seems very wrong in this entire process.
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Doug
Michael Jardeen of Radio Free Beowulf reports today on landing a new job. Congratulations Michael! I know this is something that’s been a long time coming for you. Best of luck!
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Doug
