The Richter Scale^®

With all the rampant political correctness out and about these days, people are quick to try and not offend anyone at all because even one lone voice complaining about bias is too much. Pardon my obviously offensive question, but isn’t that taking things to absurd extremes?

According to a recent Forbes article:

BIGresearch estimates that 94 percent of midwinter holiday celebrators will observe Christmas, while only 5 percent will celebrate Chanukah. And of that 5 percent, more than half will also celebrate Christmas. Only 1 percent will observe Kwanza.

That means 96.5 or more percent of the American public celebrates Christmas. Maybe up to 3.5 percent don’t (but the study doesn’t say if they are militantly anti-Christmas or tolerant of others’ celebration thereof).

I’m not a religious person. Were I to join a church, it would probably be a Unitarian Universalist church (they are the ones with the fish symbol with legs and the word Darwin inside), which preaches one should question and not simply take things on faith.

However, I have a lot of friends of all faiths (and even some avid Atheist friends), and respect their right to worship (or not) as they see fit as long as they don’t force me to share their beliefs.

And this time of year, I always wish them all - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Hindi, Buddhists, and store clerks with PC brainwashing training - a very Merry Christmas.

Christmas, while derived from religious roots, has transcended those roots to be a time one shares with family and friends, remembering all the good things in life, and simply relishing the presence and thoughts of those one finds dear.

At least that’s what Christmas is for me. This year I even had the ability to send small presents to a number of people who have helped me be a better person, and from whom I have learned over the years, and it has been a wonderful feeling to share a little with them.

Christmas is also a time for thinking of one’s fellow man. My wife and I have helped sponsor a Christmas party for a large group of the elderly living in a local home, donated to create Christmas gift baskets for the people running Bonaire’s foster home, donated food to a local church to help feed those less privileged than us, and done a variety of other small things in keeping with what we feel the Christmas spirit to be, and sharing that Spirit.

I don’t think you have to be a church-going Christian to love Christmas, or even be a purely good person, but you do have to love life and people, and be willing to share a bit of that love.

With the above in mind, bowing to the pressures of Political Correctness to appease the itsy bitsy teeny weeny minority (substantially less than 3.5% of the population per the above cited research data) and wishing people “Happy Holidays” just does not cut it for me.

So, to all of you, have a very Merry Christmas, and a most excellent and Happy New Year!

I have observed a number of things the our new Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner does which I think make for good life lessons, so, without further ado, here’s a list of five things my Roomba has taught me:

1) Don’t give up easily. The path to your goal may not be an easy one, and may in fact require lots of false starts and turns, but if you persevere, you’ll get there.

2) When you get worn out or have finished your job, head home, take a breather, and recharge your batteries.

3) Avoid slippery or unsteady situations by planning ahead. There’s nothing worse than spinning your wheels and getting nowhere, and just wearing yourself out doing it.

4) If you’re going to charge forth to change the world, it’s not a bad idea to give a bit of warning to those close to you.

5) When you’re worn out, and just don’t have the energy to do the job right, don’t let people push your buttons. Let them know you need a small break to get your wind back.

Have any additional life lessons courtesy of a Roomba? Post them in the comments.

If you’ve been anywhere near a TV in the last few days, it has been nearly impossible to miss the devastation and heartache Hurricane Katrina left in its path in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

I already donated a fair amount on Tuesday to the Red Cross to help them help those left destitute, homeless, and hungry, but I just received an e-mail from a friend who runs Strengthen the Good about a another way I can help, and I wanted to share it with you.

The idea is that we as bloggers get together and encourage our readers to donate to Katrina relief efforts, and that we bloggers will match the donations given up to a certain amount.

The details of this idea as well as the seed matching fund can be found at Matching the Good.

Due to certain work and travel constraints I am unable to manage my own matching fund, but I have just sent Alan at Strengthen the Good a pledge to add $250 to the matching fund, and I encourage you to either do the same, or just go ahead and donate so that matching funds can be used. Every dollar will help those all those devasted by Katrina.

When I get into deep philosophical discussions with friends about the meaning of life, I typically try to explain that my goal in life is to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. But outside of explaining that both my actions and the way I am raising my children to be good people are the means to this end, I have struggled to put the overall concept into a succinct set of words.

Last night in my hotel room I found decorative words, part of a poem or small essay, etched into a framed brush glass surface, attributed to American essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reading these words left me completely speechless and stunned for a while, because they so well described my life’s philosophy.

There is some speculation that perhaps he didn’t write these, and that they (or a variation) were perhaps written by Bessie Stanley in 1905.

Whoever wrote them, they still speak to me:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

Wow. There you have it.

Alan Nelson is the person who helped me make sense of blogging during a flight from Bonaire to San Juan, Puerto Rico a few months ago, and thus inspired me to start this blog (thank you Alan!).

Recently, Alan launched the latest of his many blogs - Seat 1A. (As an anecdote, I should mention that when I met Alan, he sat in Seat 1A of our ATR-72 to San Juan, while I sat in 1B - row 1 being the only row with leg room on these small planes.)

In his latest blog entry, Alan succinctly covers the issue of pruning, as suggested by the author of the most excellent book Getting Things Done (a must-read for anyone who has problems getting through his or her to-do list on a regular basis, and in a timely fashion).

Basically, as I understand it, pruning involves taking what one has written and then removing words without destroying the essence of what one needs to convey.

This is something I have tried to work on over the years as I have gotten involved in patent litigation matters - brevity for things like claim constructions is a highly prized skill, and one that causes great agony as the meaning of each word - and every nuance thereof, must be carefully analyzed before being permanently committed to paper. That’s because the other side will then attempt to rip your work apart, and you must be able to defend what you commit to - every nuance of it.

However, as a matter of practice, I pretty much suck at “pruning”. I find it far easier to write 800 words to say something than to use 400 words to say the same thing. The most difficult writing assignment I ever had was for PC Magazine about 15 years ago, when I was asked to describe in detail this very cool (at the time) technology from a company called Edsun Labs, in a 400 word article. That article took me about five times as long to complete than doing the same thing in double the number of words would have taken. And while my editor liked the result, I was not happy with it because I felt it left too much unsaid.

If you’ve seen Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus starring Tom Hulce, you may recall a scene where Mozart presents his latest composition to the King, who after a moment’s contemplation asks the court composer for comment. The response is “too many notes”, and the King, apparently not wanting to appear ignorant, agrees, although the comment is pretty nonsensical. Mozart then asks “Which notes should I take out, your highness?”.

Any reader of my blog might also note that brevity (at least in writing) is not my strong suit. But for that I make no apology. It’s the way I have learned to enjoy writing (this coming from a person who dodged writing-dependent courses in high school and college as if they were poison), and will likely continue to do so in the future.

And thus I may suffer from “too many notes”, but at least I will have said what I wanted to say, with just the right number of words for me.

Well, my talented wife, Linda Richter, has just finished yet another artistic masterpiece - an oil painting entitled Octopus Blooming:

Here’s what she has to say about it:

Sinuous and amorphous the octopus slips over the ocean bottom. Sometimes smooth and pale almost transparent, it can suddenly switch to roughly textured, deep red color and opaque.

This one curls in a shape like the blossoming of a flower – the trumpet of an underwater lily.

The original is 20 inches wide by 36 inches tall, oil on canvas, and features a smokey bronze metal canvas floater frame.

Okay, so it’s really not that new - Amazon.com has been pushing A9 for a few months now, but I’ve been so happy with Google I’ve not felt a need to sniff around another search engine.

But then I started checking out web sites listed in an article in the April 2005 issue of entitled The Great Giveaway (subscription required) about how eBay, Amazon, and Google are letting companies use their data in remarkable new ways.

Well, A9 was one of the sites listed as using Google’s data, as well as that from Alexa Web Crawl, Guru.net, IMDB, and more, in order to to provide search resorts in a novel form.

In particular, there’s a neat feature where you can click on a Site Info button for a search result and get information about the popularity of the site, what other sites people have looked at when looking at that site, and the response time of the site (note that for lightly trafficked sites, this information is not available).

In parallel to text results, A9 also produces thumbnails of images related to the search term - that was a bit eerie though - I searched on my own name and found dozens of images of my art, a photo of me, some of my photography, and a photo of myself with my wife and our gallery partner Avy.

In any event, the result rankings are pretty good, and the additional site information might helpful in doing research on related topics - the images are an added bonus.

A9 is owned by Amazon.com, incidentally.

I give the A9 search engine a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Those who know my wife know that she is a very talented painter. For those that don’t, here’s her latest completed painting:

The above is painted with oils on canvas (as are most of her works). Samples of most of her other paintings can be found on-line at http://www.LindaRichter.com

Her latest work is stunning so I figured I should share it with everyone

I’ve been struggling for months with trying to get a blog set up on my own server, using Movable Type. The stuggle was not that the software was difficult to use, but that configuring it was not exactly fun, the user interface was archaic, and I really want to be able to compose blog entries in e-mail and send those in. While I know Movable Type can do all that, it was uphill all the way for me.

Enter ExpressionEngine…

I asked a fellow patent practioner about his use of Movable Type for his blog when he mentioned that he was getting his new site designed and set up using ExpressionEngine from pMachine.

I went and checked out the software, downloaded a trial, installed it on one of my servers, installed the required Zend Optimizer as well, and was ready to go. Six hours later I committed and plunked down my $199.95 for a commerical license.

ExpressionEngine “out of the box” may work for some people, but I wanted a number of non-default settings, including implementing the software on multiple sites - this one, and as a complete face lift for my aging and ugly Richter Scale Article web site - the new version, still a work in process, looks a lot like my blog site, but with many subtle differences.

ExpressionEngine is meant to be highly configurable, and even for a software jockey like myself, it was a challenge, but as I overcame one issue after another (learning lots of useful information along the way) I finally ended up with sites that I am really happy with. And I see enormous potential for this software. It provides excellent blogging support as well as good general site publishing capabilities.

Now I just have to keep writing entries for this blog and finishes porting my articles to the new interface over on the Article site…

ExpressionEngine gets a 7.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale